How to cut a carrot

It always surprises me how many people get this wrong - surely it's just plain common sense?!

Of course, you want all your slices of carrot to be roughly even, so that they all take the same time to cook...  Everyone knows that larger slices will take longer to cook right the way through than smaller slices, so you have decide beforehand what size slices you want, and allow enough time for whatever size slices you've decided upon to cook properly...

However, there is a complication - and it's one which often gets overlooked...  Slicing a carrot regularly, right from one end to t'other, may seem like the ideal - but in real life, this is fraught with difficulties!  Because, you see, in the real world, very few carrots are of an even width, all the way along - they taper, dontcha know, they taper!

Observe these carrots -

(I must confess, I did not, actually, take this photograph of carrots myself - I stole it from the internet...)

But you can see, in the picture, how the carrots taper, can't you?  So, if your slices are the same thickness all the way down your carrot, each slice will actually be a different volume of carrot, due to the varying width...  And, when you take your carrots out of the pan to serve them, a few may be cooked nicely, but many will be overcooked and mushy, while many others will be still raw in the middle...  Disaster!

So, here's what you do...

You start at the wide end of the carrot, slicing very thin slices...  You then work your way down towards the thin end of the wedge carrot, gradually increasing the thickness of the slices you cut, to compensate for the ever-diminishing width of the carrot...  This means that, although the slices may look less even than you have previously been used to, you are actually creating a more regular volume of carrot in each slice than ever before, and now, when you serve up your portions of carrots, each slice will have been cooked to perfection - no more, and no less!

Now, isn't that nice?