Evan X. Merz

Before we get into this, I need to tell you that I am not a cook in any fashion. My wife does 99% of the cooking in our house. I generally only cook for myself.

I am a gardener, and I don't like to let the food I grow go to waste. This becomes a conundrum in summer when we are harvesting more vegetables than we can immediately use, but it's also an issue in winter when harvesting vegetables that not everyone in the family enjoys. In winter in California there are two vegetables that I am typically harvesting: lettuce and radishes.

Lettuce is extremely easy to use. Throw it in a salad, put it on a sandwich, etcetera.

Radishes, on the other hand, are something of an enigma. They taste pretty awful raw. The leaves have sharp spines, and the body of the radish has a peppery flavor that can be overwhelming.

This recipe was born out of my desire to find a pleasant way to eat a lot of radishes. I like to make it for lunch on chilly days when there are radishes to harvest in the back yard.

Ingredients

You can use any type of radish for this recipe. I usually use Daikon radishes because I grow a lot of them and the leaves are bigger than on red radishes, but the red radishes will work fine. If you are using red radishes then you might want to use two of them.

1. 1 radish
2. 1 container of chicken ramen
3. 1 tablespoon of honey
4. 1 teaspoon of garlic powder (or 1 clove of fresh garlic, chopped)

Recipe

As I said at the beginning of this post, I am not a cook. So this recipe is pretty simple.

1. Chop up the leafy parts of 4 or 5 radish leaves. Do not use the leafless stems.
2. Chop up the soft, white middle section of a small daikon radish. Only use as much as you want.
3. Make ramen as usual, using boiling water and adding the spice packet.
4. Add radish, radish greens, honey, and garlic to the bowl.
5. Wait 1 minute to allow the leaves to cook down a bit (this softens the spines).
6. Enjoy!