Roasted radishes & radish greens with dill

Saturday, 23 April 2011 | 3 comments

Roasted radishes & radish greens with dill

Radishes–the pink or red ones, at least– rank high on my list of prettiest things sitting in a farmer’s market stall. Even if I didn’t like radishes, I feel as if I’d buy them and attempt to find a way I could palate them, just for the rosy pop of pink greeting me when I opened the fridge.

But I do like radishes. Which is fortunate, because you know how people always warn, “Never grocery shop on an empty stomach”? For me, I think the advice should be, “Don’t shop on a cold, drizzly day in April when you’re starved for color.” Because I took home three big bunches of the season’s first pink radishes, damp from the rain, dirt clinging to their leaves. And I’m pretty sure it was more for how they lit up the grey day than because I wanted to eat radishes every day for a week.

I grew up eating radishes raw, as crudités or on bread with a little butter. They don’t need much. Young radishes, especially, are a lot subtler and lack the too-peppery bite that scares some people away. Lately, though, I’ve been seeing a lot of cooked versions of radishes. Braised. Sautéed. I like radishes just fine raw, and couldn’t really imagine what a cooked one would taste like. I don’t think I ever would have attempted it were it not for a stubborn quest I’m on to use all edible parts of the vegetables I cook–the parts that normally get discarded. First it was turnip greens (success). Then using the darker green parts of a leek (failure). And today, when I asked the nice man at the farmer’s market if people cooked often with radish greens, he told me, “Well, you could. But the leaves are kind of prickly.” Appetizing, right?

But this is a quest. You can’t let some prickly radish greens get in the way of your ~~cheapskate~~ frugal quest to get the most bang for your buck, nourishment-wise. So it was decided on my way home that I’d be having radishes and radish greens for lunch. And finally, some sort of cooked radish made sense, since anything prickly most likely needs to be cooked before eating.

The radishes themselves got a simple treatment, browned a bit in a skillet with some salt and pepper before moving to the oven. The trick here is a pretty hot oven–I set mine all the way up to 500 degrees–so that your radishes don’t slow-cook down to mush. You still want them to have a bit of their snappy texture when they come out of the oven. From there, they get finished on the stovetop with some butter and dill to wilt down the greens, and then a splash of lemon. This came together much more quickly than I anticipated, so unless you really want to be like me, eating roasted radishes at 10:30 in the morning, then start making this just 20 minutes or so before serving.