Radish Green Stir Fry

In the anticipative joy of the pre-radish harvest someone suggested to me that I might not only enjoy my radish, but also the radish greens. What?  You can cook radish greens?  According to Google, yes, you can. There aren't may recipes online thought, so I just went with a recipe for Kale stir fry and modified it as I saw fit...

Savory Greens Stir-Fry 

Ingredients

1 tablespoon olive oil
12 cloves garlic, minced
1 small onion shallot, halved and sliced thin
1 (7 ounce) can water chestnuts, drained and thinly sliced
1 red pepper seeded and cut into strips
1 large handful snowpeas
3 or more shiitake mushrooms, sliced (if using dried, soak, discard the stems and slice)
1 pound kale radish greens, washed and cut into large pieces
1 teaspoon mirin (or seasoned brown rice vinegar)
1 teaspoon tamari (or high quality soy sauce)
Freshly ground black pepper red pepper flakes, to taste 

1/3 box vermicelli noddles, soaked as described on box

Ingedients

Method

Heat oil in a large skillet over medium high heat. Add garlic and shallots and sauté until onions are translucent. Be careful not to brown garlic or it will give a bitter taste.

Add veggies and shiitake mushrooms, and noodles. Sauté for 3 minutes. Add greens and sauté for 1 minute. Add mirin, tamari and pepper and continue cooking until greens are just tender.

Radish Greens cut into strips
I was scared the texture would be too tough for big leaves

Everything in the pan

A minute later with the greens wilted

Dinner is served!

Bill's Bulleit and Garden Mint cocktail

Result: Awesome!  As an Inter-Mountain Region girl (aka non-southerner), greens are not my forte, but stir-fry style, they're AWESOME.  And the radish greens had a certain meatiness about them which really beefed up the stir-fry veggies.  Yum yum!  This recipe may get a re-run further along in garden season.

A Radish Sandwich

Bill and I got this amazing crop of radishes – our very first joint vegetable.  And the question became what to do with them.  After our sweat and tears (or just Bill’s sweat) our crop flourished without thinking too much that neither of us are big fans of radishes.  Hmmm. 

Dad grew up on the farm and I’ve been having fun telling him about the small-scale effort as growers going on in Bill’s backyard.  He told me that when he was younger he loved radish sandwiches, with a thick piece of bread, some butter, and some fresh sliced radishes.  That sounded pretty good for our first attempt at cooking with our very own produce. 

Meanwhile my friend Lannae has been telling me about the joys of homemade butter.  The only time I’ve ever made my own butter was during the one week of summer when my brother and I went to “little prairie school house” for a week of pioneer schoolhouse fun.  We made butter by churning it or taking turns shaking it in a jar, and then snacking on Saltines and fresh butter.  Lannae’s method (found here) is much easier.  Step 1: Pour cream in the food processor, Step 2: Turn it on,  Step 3 rinse and enjoy.  Ok, there’s a little more detail than that, but not much.

So we hit up the Turnip Truck on our way home one evening and grabbed some cream and bread.  We tried to get Hatcher Farms cream for our project, it comes from a farm south of Nashville.  The shelf was wiped clean out.  No luck.  So instead we ended up with something from "Organic Valley".  It's ok, cause it was still delicious.  And then bread from Silke's in Clarksville.  Super Yummy.  Suspiciously, Bill and I snuck out THE DAY AFTER our radish sandwich project to the Top Chef Tour at the Farmers Market and caught one of the quickfire challenges.  The cream they had on hand was all Hatcher Farms!!!  I wonder if that's why there wasn't any available at the 'Truck.  

Supplies - minus radishes

 The Icicle Radishes all sliced up.  Aren't they pretty?  I think the look like snow flakes or little ice crystals.  Or Christmas ornaments.  Taste-bitter Look-Gorgeous.

Sliced radishes

 Poured the cream in, hit the on switch and let it roll for a couple minutes.  It went faster than some of YouTube videos described it taking to separate the butter from the buttermilk.  I think because it was a smaller batch.  It's so funny but it was like magic seeing the cream morph into something else.  And ta-da, there was butter!!

The separated product - butter and residual liquid

Draining and rinsing out the cream
Nice warm day needed pecan pie beer

 In the end we made two varieties: the standard straight out of the rinse butter, and then a lightly salted fresh basil variety (it gave us an excuse to clip some of the basil as it was getting heavy).

Version 1: Straight out of the blender, rinsed, spread on toasted multi-grain bread and topped with thinly sliced radishes.  Result: good but a little bit bland.  Lots of radish flavor, but not much butter flavor.  We toasted our culinary accomplishment with the beers

radish sandwiches with fresh butter "au naturale"

 Version 2: Same as above but the fresh butter was mixed with a little sea salt and chopped basil.  Verdict - AWESOME!  Oh my gosh.  Just a little pick me up, and I think I could be a radish sandwich convert!  It was amazing!!! Even Bill's roommates were starting to get excited about our garden-to-table culinary experiments.

And so inaugurates our first harvesting season from the back yard garden.  Not too bad a start.   

Icicle Radishes!! The Harvest

The little baby icicle radishes are ready to harvest.  They are so leafy and green and according to the seed packet... they're ready to go!

Goodbye radish plants

First sneak peak at the harvest

There were some significant size differences between the radishes.  I think with as big and bushy as the greens got, we could have weeded them out more and given them more space.  But there were many of them that were a great radish size.

The bigger and the smaller of the harvest

I love the beautiful white color of the Icicles.  They look so fresh and perky with the greens and white.

I'm not sure I'm that big a fan of the taste of radishes to begin with, but they grow fast and can be started in the cool spring and were a wonderful way to inaugurate ourselves as farmers.  It's a little embarrassing how much joy I got from seeing our little seeds all grown up.  Like magic!!

Ravishing Radishes

Bill and I had the perfect Saturday.  We met Bill's folks down at Arrington Vineyards to celebrate Bill's mom's birthday.  It has been the first really beautiful weekend of the year as far as Nashville weather goes, and perfect for wine and this amazing cheese tray from Corrieri's.  Every afternoon we go to Arrington is amazing, and this was no exception.  Great to catch up and exhale deeply and just enjoy the sunshine.  Bill and I split and strolled downtown Franklin for a little bit before checking out the Green Wagon Spring Re-Opening, and then as the sun was setting made our way back to the house with the white picket fence in time to catch Bill's parents as they were about to head back south after their Nashville day.  Bill's mom and mentioned to us that she'd checked out our garden and was so excited that we already had stuff growing.  WHAT????  What's growing???  *and then we quickly trampled out to the back yard to investigate*  

Our first specimens

OH MY GOODNESS!!!  Little sproutlings!  Quick consult of the planting grid confirmed that our icicle radishes are already growing!!!  And they are just the cutest little things with these sweet little green leaves that look like miniature emerald butterflies just happened to land inside a couple of the grid squares.

The little hatchlings

We'll have to see how the develop in the next week or so.  The seed packet lists a very quick time to harvest - only 28 days.  Could we potentially be sampling our first vegetable just three weekends from now?  I certainly don't want to get too excited, but how much fun to have the first indicators of our urban farmership pop up so quickly.