Chili Crisp + Peanut Carrot “Noodles”

As I type this, the sun has finally blown up the valley below my little kitchen apartment. The dishwasher is humming away.

I call this little perch the kitchen apartment because it’s more kitchen than anything else. A bedroom, small bathroom, and a little living room attached to a pcoket kitchen with (just barely) everything I need to complete my task this week of cooking for a strong handful of the ladies here at RedBull Rampage. And then, there’s an extensive patio where most of the magic of cooking, serving + taking in the view of this awesome place in the world takes place.

This is the third time I’ve been to Virgin; the first two times with RedBull Formation, and now for Rampage. The lift is different this year; not as many mouths to feed, not as many meals to cook. But this year I don’t have an assistant to lend a hand, and I have a bigger business to run from this couch, and a little boy whom I’m thinking about + trying to connect with in meaningful ways all the time. Even after two years of taking a break from big cooking events like this, I still know how to do it. And, it turns out, I’ve learned how to do it BETTER.

More than expected. And, less.

The values of what I’m doing here are the same. The same as what I practice in my own house. Truly GOOD food, locally + seasonally sourced, without nonsense. All the things our bodies need to thrive, and nothing more or less. And, to be very honest, if I thought that task was challenging at home, it’s even harder to accomplish here. This part of the country is a sea of big box stores, discount prices and quick fixes. It’s taken some time to read between the lines and find what I need…then to find the time to execute the way I want.

I recently read a quote by Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, commenting about how none of the easy decisions available to us in modern times are the healthy choices. That our well-being is sacrificed by shortcuts. And (as you know,) I 100% believe this is true. The easy way to feed yourself is not to source from the farm, to cook meals from scratch. It’s to order takeout. Or use a meal kit. Or microwave a burrito. None of which do the same thing of getting the foods that nature intended into your body so you can build your life on them.

The nutshell is that I want MORE from myself, more for these athletes. And I have less time, and few resources to make it happen. So, sometimes I have to get creative.

Meals that make themselves

And so, I have to build my menus around meals where the time I am NOT cooking is actually working for me. I employ devices (like a pressure cooker, and a huge rice cooker) that do work for me while my hands are busy with other things, effectively to reduce the time I need to spend personally cooking. And, I pick recipes where most of the works is done by time itself. A slow cooked roast, or cut of meat. Pickling, marinating and stewing. All mean I can take a couple of quick steps, then let the science + magic of cooking do the rest. The result is less insanity, and waaay better flavor.

This is a practice that doesn’t just apply to cooking for huge groups of people. This is the way I cook at home too.

The night before leaving to drive to Utah, I was buttoning up the kitchen for the boys and needed to make myself some lunch; something that would stand up on my drive, would put the rest of a our abundant carrot stash to good use, and would feel like a special treat of a meal on the lonely drive south. And this is how these “Chili Crisp + Peanut Carrot Noodles ” came to be. I shaved the carrots before I went to bed, and swirled together the simple marinade while I was making dinner. While I slept, this gorgeous little recipe cooked the carrots and made me lunch. BRILLIANT! And it meant I could spend that night getting last cuddles with Leo, spending time with Pete, completing my packing tasks so none of them haunted me on my departure morning, and getting a little extra sleep.

These carrot “noodles”

…are not really “noodles,” but a lovely salad – twirlable with a fork, I might add, that time makes for you. Simply whisk together the ingredients for the peanut sauce, and pour it over your shaved carrots. The whole process takes 5 minutes? Ten minutes if you’re hunting for measuring spoons? And, the faster you get with shaving your carrots, the more you’ll love this one. The sauce will “cook” + tenderize the carrots a bit, pickling them in the zippy, deep, punchy marinade. And then you can put them wherever you wish! The trick works with cucumbers too, and so I added a few of these into the mix when I made my lunch for the drive,  adding them both bowl with sushi rice, grilled chicken, fresh farm greens + a sprinkle of sesame seeds. It was so good, I pulled over to take a picture of my lunch (complete with a napkin – indeed) in my lap as I was driving. This sweet, simple, low-lift, high impact dish is WORTH IT.

Enjoy this one, my friends!