Cooking Radishes

Several years ago, overwhelmed by the number of radishes showing up in my CSA box, I did a bit of research into whether or not you could cook them. I'd never seen a cooked radish, and I was accumulating more of them than I could happily eat as part of my--almost daily--salad.

I browsed through several cookbooks but no recipes called for cooking them, so I continued to eat them raw. I suppose I could have just gone ahead and tried, but I didn't.

Several weeks ago my employees started bring them back to the kitchen from the markets: some of the farmers who we buy from were offering them, and the price was right. So we cut them up and cooked them, and we found them both tasty and colorful. We've been using them ever since, and I've done some subsequent research and learned that cooking them isn't nearly as strange as I had once believed.

I strongly believe that, if the sustainable food movement is going to really make a difference in the way we source food and use the resources that go into producing food, we've got to challenge preconceptions about all kinds of things, from what we discard to where we shop. This experience with the radishes gave me the opportunity to discard a different kind of preconception: one that dictated that there was only one acceptable way to eat radishes.