Glazed carrots

Put the carrots and butter in a wide-bottomed saucepan over a low heat and sprinkle them with the salt, pepper and sugar. Make sure the carrots form a single layer on the bottom of the pan. Cover with a lid and cook for about 30 minutes, shaking the pan occasionally to ensure even cooking.

Add the thyme and cook for a further five minutes until tender and glazed.

When boiled, carrots - like asparagus - lose a lot of their flavour to the water. Cooking them in fat, on the other hand, is an excellent way to lock in as much of the flavour as possible. Up to a certain point, the longer carrots are cooked, the sweeter they will be. Obviously, you don't want to end up with something unpleasantly soft, but it's worth pushing the cooking time a little in order to capture that sweetness. Once the carrots are cooked, you can turn up the heat to caramelise them. Instead of the thyme, you could finish the carrots with ground coriander, or a touch of cumin and a little orange zest, or - my favourite - some ground caraway.

Recipe from Heston Blumenthal at Home, by Heston Blumenthal, published by Bloomsbury, $65.