Hi everyone! First an update on the garden… In the last post, I mentioned that the bean foliage was turning yellow, and no new beans were developing, and the something had gotten into the kale (my guess is the dog), so I took them out and replanted with the extra seeds I had leftover. It’s only been a week, and everything is coming up beautifully. The beans are amazing – already about 5 inches high. I planted some peas next to the beans, and they are just beginning to peek out of the soil.
The kale looks like it is all going to grow as well.
I also had to pick the radishes, as they grow so quickly, and I replanted for an additional crop of those, too.
The radishes looked gorgeous, so large and bright red, and the radish tops were really abundant as well. My plan was to use the entire plant somehow, as all of it is edible. I was hoping to just tear the leaves into bite sizes and use them in a salad with some lettuce, however I read that although you can eat them, they aren’t very pleasant when served raw. Apparently, they are a little tough and have a fuzziness that just doesn’t work on the tongue.
I did some more research online, and I found that many people make a salad dressing with the radish tops. Brilliant!
I picked and cleaned a bunch of lettuce to use for the base of a salad. Then I thinly sliced a couple of radishes and added them to the lettuce. I also picked a couple of small tomatoes and chopped them up and added them in. I whipped up the radish leaf salad dressing and tossed the salad with it, and it was delicious, and incredibly quick and easy to prepare. Here is how I made it:
Ingredients
Cleaned radish tops from the freshly harvested bunch of radishes
2 cloves garlic, minced
½ cup sour cream
¼ cup olive oil
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
½ tsp salt
½ tsp freshly ground pepper
Instructions (this is the really easy part!)
Put all the ingredients into a food processor or blender and mix it until it’s smooth.
How much easier could it get?
Other suggestions I saw were to use the dressing as a dip for veggies, and some people used the radish tops to make a radish top pesto. I’ll give that a try with the next crop.
