You can eat carrot greens! Who knew?

Sometimes, a piece of information falls into your lap at precisely the moment you need it. That’s what happened when I read “Yes, Carrot Tops are Edible…and Delicious” in Gilt Taste, a new online magazine and specialty shop selling artesanal ingredients.

I always thought that carrot greens or tops were toxic or at least inedible. But Aki Kamozawa and H. Alexander Talbot write, “There is wonderful flavor in those carrot tops—a sophisticated, earthy character with a hint of bitterness and herbal notes from the abundant chlorophyll.” Who knew?

Normally, I’d have to file that information away for at least a month. But because we planted carrots in the greenhouse in February, we are harvesting some now. We have a bumper crop of healthy green fronds ready to experiment with. I’ve been bringing home baby carrots every few days but leaving the green tops in the compost pile. Today, I brought it all home.

A cold plate with greenhouse lettuce, carrots, and potatoes and a green sauce made from carrot tops, garlic, olive oil, and pine nuts.

It was still hot as blazes this afternoon, so I planned a cold plate with dressed salad greens, baby carrots, potatoes that I steamed earlier and chilled (the first from a small patch in the greenhouse), hard-boiled eggs, and carrot-green sauce, essentially a pesto with carrot tops, garlic, salt, olive oil, and a few pine nuts.

Best-laid plans: by the time dinnertime rolled around, a thunder- and hail-storm had passed through, dropping the temperature by more than fifteen degrees and officially ending this week’s heat wave. So a cold dish was no longer mandatory. And because of a snafu with the hard-boiled (not) eggs, at the last minute I toasted some crusty bread from Black Sheep Hill and scrubbed it with garlic. I spooned the garlicky carrot-top pesto on the cold potatoes and warm toast, and decided it was a keeper. I’m looking forward to  trying some of the other suggestions in the Gilt Taste column, including just adding the feathery fronds to summer salads.