Honey-Glazed Roasted Carrots with Pistachios

If you are looking for a simple vegetable side dish, these easy, fast roasted carrots are the answer. Roasting the carrots brings out their inherent sweetness, and the honey glaze rounds it out with buttery, floral flavors. The cumin lends the carrots a bit of earthiness and serves as a savory counterpart to the honey.

Pick carrots that are around the same size, so they cook evenly. If your carrots are of different thicknesses, cut them so they are roughly the same size. You can use orange carrots, or a variety of colors.

These carrots couldn't be easier to make; they require just five minutes of hands-on preparation time, then go straight in the oven to roast. Just peel or shrub whole carrots and trim the greens on top to prepare them for roasting. After heating up the butter and oil in the baking dish, all you need to do is whisk in the honey, water, and cumin, and toss the mixture with the carrots and garlic cloves and put them in the oven to roast. Covering the carrots with foil for the first half of the cooking time helps contain the heat so they cook through and become tender, and then leaving them uncovered for the last 30 minutes allows the carrots to glaze in the buttery honey sauce and roast until lightly browned. Don't add the pistachios until the last 10 minutes of cooking time; otherwise they will burn in the hot oven. After you pull the carrots out of the oven, serve them warm or at room temperature — they are delicious either way.