Homemade salad dressing is a particular passion of mine. Usually quick and easy to make from a few pantry ingredients and whatever fresh herbs are in the CSA box or growing out in the garden, it is almost always better than anything I can purchase pre-made from the store.
I am blessed with a garden that grows radishes quickly and a daughter who eats them. Usually I serve them just with salt. Erin Gleeson's idea to top radishes with butter bumps them up a notch to make a more substantial snack or first course.
There is a recipe for shaved fennel and radish salad in this week's Eatwell Farm newsletter and both ingredients in the box, along with green garlic. Chicken broth, arborio rice and green garlic seem like natural companions to me, so I'll add some shrimp and we'll have risotto with a little sauteed kale and this salad on the side.
This is another tweeted recipe from @CHOW. I made it for lunch with Eatwell Farm's radishes, romaine, parsley and chickpeas, but it could be for dinner, maybe with black beans instead. Recipes that take up 140 characters or less are extra nice for people like me who don't particularly enjoy following directions. The fewer there are the happier I am.
Last year I received Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything for my birthday, from a dear friend. It is a big and impressive book and because of its heft and lack of fancy photographs, I lumped it into the same go-to-first category that Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking and Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone occupy at my house.
Tonight's chicken tacos were the best dinner ever. In addition to both kids eating it, my daughter ate five radishes. Five! I've been putting beautiful little radishes on the table and eating them with great relish around my family for years now, but I I've never seen her eat more than one tiny nibble, until tonight. Truth be told, I don't even like radishes that much. But I eat them anyway.