Each spring brings us delicious new, young vegetables: peas, asparagus, onions, and radishes. Radishes are the pink darlings of early spring. Cherry red, fuchsia, magenta, hot pink, carmine, crimson, scarlet, carnelian, vermilion, coral, cardinal, cerise – I could go through my piles of art supply catalogues picking out the names of vivid reds and pinks all day long – radishes are deeply satisfying to look at, and to gobble up.
Radishes grow fast – plant seeds 30 days after the last frost and you, too, can enjoy pink spicy goodness. I think our last frost happened earlier this week – it’s planting time!
How can we resist the lure of fresh radishes? Especially when we get fancy, and doll them up with butter and a hint of Maldon salt? The butter tones down the peppery, hot flavor of radish and turns it into an indulgent treat. Dorie Greenspan says, “It’s a little trick the French play to bring foods into balance, and it works.”
Have you tried sliced radishes on buttered bread? They will jazz up your next tea party the way cucumber sandwiches never have. Although, if you were French, you would have been eating radishes on buttered slices of brown bread for breakfast for years. Mais oui!
And if you’d rather not be picking up disks of radishes escaping from your sandwiches, try this easy peasy radish butter. Yumsters! Radish Butter
Consider the cocktail, and how easy it is to add some sliced radishes to your favorite Bloody Mary recipe. (Don’t forget – Easter is early this year.) Easter Cocktails Radishes will add a kick to the bloodies you might need to add to your Easter brunch menu – making all those jelly beans palatable.
Here’s one for Mr. Sanders to perfect: grilled steak with grilled radishes. Grilled Steak It makes me sad, though, to cook a radish. There are some vegetables that are meant to be eaten gloriously simple and raw – like fresh peas, carrots, green beans and celery.
I think I will just mosey out to the kitchen now and cut the tops off some fresh, rosy red, admittedly-store-bought radishes. Then I’ll slice off the root ends, pretend that I can carve the little globes into beauteous scarlet rosettes, and plop them into a small bowl of ice water. Then I will sprinkle some crunchy Maldon salt flakes over the clumsy rose petal shapes I have created, and eat one of my favorite root vegetables.
“People were always the limiters of happiness
except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”
― Ernest Hemingway
