You Can Eat The Whole Lot

The Happy Radish

Let’s start at the very beginning. A very good place to start. Which to me, is radishes. Radishes, the easiest, most reliable of crops, fast and bright and right at the start of the new season. This year, got my numbers wrong all over the place. I wanted a bumper crop for a fundraiser for wonder charity Chefs in Schools (that I helped to establish with brilliant, brave chef Nicole Pisani back in 2018. But that’s another story). I grew them with the bright hope that they would be ready to use instead of flowers in little glass milk bottles for the table. The idea was that you would see the bright pink radish inside the bottle and that a great plume of green would be sticking out the top. Original, I thought (feeling a bit smug) and visually effective and most importantly - almost free. Anyway. I counted back 35 days, planted them half in the green house in the hope that they would definitely grow – this was March, we were still getting hard frosts - and half outside in a veg bed, for useful comparison.

I planted Sparklers and French Breakfast and Big Purple and some unidentifiable generic ‘mix’. I planted a lot of them, hundreds, just in case. And then I watched as they didn’t grow. What grew instead were suspicious holes in the top of the compost inside the greenhouse– and nothing at all outside. After a week of watching the pattern of dents, I realised that a mouse probably was coming every night and fishing out the seeds for its supper. Yum. Still, there was time to replant – this time, I went for 18-day Radish, the classic breakfast radish, long and slender – not so visually, globule-y satisfying, but still, a radish. I planted them, and I this time I covered them in mesh. They germinated, hooray. Inside first, as expected, double hooray. And then, they grew very very slowly. At 18 days they were tiny roots with the occasional one plumped out to the size of an Alice In Wonderland skittle. Suffice to say, we picked flowers for the party instead.

Three weeks later, I can report that radishes are most definitely a spring outside crop. The ones inside never really flourished. They clearly prefer to be cold and they take 30-35 days to fully develop – even 18 day ones. So now I have hundreds of radishes outside and no one in the family much likes radishes. Double problem being that the leaves of the nost varieties are inedibly prickly – I had assumed they would make great early salad crop. I have pickled some (good trick here: reuse the pickle juice from any bought pickles, it can happily hang around for months in the fridge. I have an obsession currently with the soy-pickled cucumbers made by Cultjar x Koya Omiyage, but the kids mostly love Mrs Hamisha’s sandwich pickles which they eat with everything and mostly out of the jar).

So I have started to cook them, fresh little sweeties on the plate that go deliciously with pretty much everything. Like chard, they are almost 2 vegetables: the radish itself, which goes halved (to more easily pick up some colour) into the pan first, to braise and caramelise for a few minutes, followed by their greens, to wilt for a couple of minutes, the heat and steam softening the prickles and making them edible.

It is a lesson to take to many vegetables. That, for the most part, that all of veg are edible, even the humbler parts, we have just become a bit spoilt by years of plenty. Cauliflower leaves, chard stalks, broccoli stems, parsley stalks, carrot tops, root vegetable peelings – they all have an honest contribution to make and a rough beauty on the plate. I will return to each of them in due course. In the meantime, to the radishes:

A Happy Cooked Radish

Thoroughly wash your radishes and separate the leaves, keeping both. Halve the radishes – lengthways looks prettier. Warm some butter and/or olive oil in a pan and first add the radishes. Cover and allow to braise and colour for 3 or 4 minutes, tossing a couple of times. Chopped spring onions and/or fresh ginger also great to add at this point if you have some. Then add the leaves and cover again for a minute or two till they collapse, turning once. Strain off any liquid to serve, finishing with a swirl of olive oil and a scrunch of salt. Great as part of a warm salad, alongside some protein or simply with some cooked quinoa and or lentils.