Carrots with sesame and breadcrumbs are my secret weapon in the battle to get children to eat vegetables. 😊

Adding sesame to vegetables was an experiment I started with salad. It worked with my daughter, who began eating salad thanks to sesame, but with Fabrizio, the experiment was more challenging, and I had to apply it to other vegetables before discovering it could work with carrots. 😃 The next step was easy: adding breadcrumbs was an ‘aesthetic’ consequence because it made the carrots more visually appealing to my son, and besides, I like using breadcrumbs in cooking, I find it a useful ingredient, but perhaps you already guessed that since it appears in many of my recipes.

Sesame has been used in cooking (and so have other seeds) for relatively little time. I would say that about twenty years ago, it wasn’t as known and appreciated as it is today. The traditional cooking of my childhood, with which I took my first steps in the kitchen, did not include seeds as we use them now. I like this update; I really enjoy using seeds now, although I must confess that initially, I made some naive mistakes, for example, I didn’t know that sesame releases its characteristic flavor after toasting. 😃😌

For those who don’t know how to toast sesame yet, here’s my method (some also toast it in the oven): put the sesame seeds in a non-stick pan and heat them until they begin to color. If some seeds start to pop, quickly turn off the burner and immediately transfer them to a plate because leaving them in the hot pan would continue to cook them and they would become bitter.

Sesame can be toasted together with salt, in this case, you get gomasio, a very popular seasoning in macrobiotic cooking and an excellent salt substitute, which I recommend always having in your kitchen.

Well, are you ready to prepare this very simple and excellent side dish?