The Month of Love: Radishes

[daidoji_gisei]

My Story Team duties kinda ate up all my writing time last week, so I'm running behind on TMOL. However, I persevere!

On Friday I was chatting on the phone with the charming and talented yhlee and I told her I had a list of possible topic for TMOL but that a lot of them were about food. "That's good!" she said, "food is important!" And so with no embarrassment I'm going to talk about my love for radishes.

I suppose of all the vegetables to have a passion for, radishes are an odd choice. They aren't hideously expensive, like fennel, and they don't require you to kill a tree, like hearts of palm, and they aren't a nutritional power-house like spinach, and they don't take three years to grow like asparagus. They are available year-round, and anyone with a small patch of well-watered ground can grow a crop in about a month. They are common.

I love them. They are sweet and crunchy and snappy, and because they are almost always eaten raw they are quick to prepare. I say 'almost always' because you can cook them; I've found that the really hot ones at the end of the season can be mellowed by braising them in butter. (But hey, what isn't mellowed by being braised in butter?)

I didn't realize how much of a radish fan I was until a few years ago at the local farmer's market, when I observed that in the moments before the opening whistle everyone else was lined up in front of the stalls with piles of asparagus and I was alone, standing in front of the stall with the best-looking radishes. It was kind of an odd moment.

Looking back on my childhood I guess I should have noticed this earlier. In my growing-up years, we had a large vegetable garden in the back yard and I liked to go out and eat radishes right out of the garden. I'd pull them up, rub the dirt off on my jeans and eat them right there. It's kind of amazing that any of them lasted long enough to be picked for the table. (Of course, it was a big garden. And you can continuously sow radishes. Yet another one of their many virtues!)

And so it is. Spring is around the corner. Soon the farmer's market will reopen, and I can feast on fresh radishes, radishes that still have their leafy emerald crowns and have never seen the inside of a plastic bag. *bliss*

Comments

[yoritomo-reiko.livejournal.com]

You know, I used to do the same thing with carrots. We couldn't grow a lot in our backyard, simply because the ground wasn't really right for it. But for a couple of years, we had carrots. And I would go out some days, dig out a carrot and wash it off under the outside tap before eating it.

I've never been big on radishes, though. My parents loved them, though.

[helen-keeble.livejournal.com]

I love Julia Child's 'The Art of French Cooking', just for her attitude to vegetables, which may be summed up as, "Braise in 2oz of butter". I think the only thing she doesn't pour butter on is lettuce...