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.   

Cooking Chicken

I've mentioned how excited I am about the CSA, right? And about the same time 365Nashville.com posted this! The University School of Nashville offers evening classes to support the school.  There's all kinds of topics... gardening, photography, food and wine, self improvement, knitting...  Emily and I took this AMAZING cooking class, "Cooking with Local Ingredients".  SO MUCH FUN.  I was pumped to try and learn to cook a little better to get ready for veggie season.  Kevin Ramquist, head chef of F. Scott's was our instructor and we lucked out that it was a super small class, as half of it couldn't make the time (re-scheduling issues) so the three of us taking the class had almost one-on-one instruction by Kevin and F. Scott's pastry chef Paige.  

The menu read like this:

Salad

Famer Dave's Baby Swiss Chard and Pea Tendrils,

Tennessee Buttermilk White Cheddar Dressing, Benton's

Bacon Lardons, Sunny Side Up Jolly Barnyard Egg

Entree

Roasted Emerald Glen Farms Chicken, Farmer Dave's

 Sweet Potato and Gold Rush Apple Hash, Herbed Chicken 

Jus, Sorrel Salad, Bonnie Blue Goat Cheese

Dessert

Olive and Sinclair Chocolate Tasting

And it was really incredible.  I was in love.  And if I'm going to convince Bill that cooking classes are money well spent (and FUN!) then I should put my newly learned skills to practice.  With a few exceptions it went pretty well.  

1) Cutting up a whole raw chicken.  Gross.  I HATE touching raw meat.  Necessary evil for sweet Bill's dinner.  I used this video to help me remember a little bit how to get it done:

Sparing you the gross details, it turned out just fine!  Look!  Chicken cut up and pretty!! and into the oven for 40 minutes at 400

On the shopping list: a decent size roasting pan
Until then, the brownie pan.

Chopped the sweet potatoes, apples, and onions and cooked them up for the hash.  The sauce reduced but didn't get the saucy consistency that the one in class did.  And I couldn't find Sorrel in the Kroger... So I went with some Arugula on sale.  Still yummy... but I think Bill's going to let me stick some Sorrel in his garden box!

Turned out yummy!

The chicken turned out PERFECT.  I know it's silly, but it was a huge personal accomplishment to cut up and cook some excellent bird!

Side Note:  After the cooking class, I've been SO anxious to try F. Scott's after our cooking class - plus the great reviews from Lannae.  While Bill and I were doing some shopping in Green Hills and he suggested a spontaneous date night to F. Scott's while we were there.  *He's so sweet* We had the greatest dinner... Crab au Gratin for a starter then I got the seared scallops with quinoa, acorn squash, and black garlic butter.  Bill tried orange glazed duck breast,with herb dumplings, onions,and baby carrots, in broth.  It was so really yummy and such a special treat.