A couple of years ago I discovered garlic scapes, made pesto out of the green curlicues and got a little crazy with it. I bought all the scapes I could get my hands on – which wasn’t a lot and wasn’t for long, since their season is short – made pesto like mad and packed my stash in the freezer, ready for that proverbial rainy day. This spring, I just might be doing the same thing with radish leaves! Whodda thunk?
As soon as I came back from the organic market on Boulevard Raspail with fat white asparagus and mild sweet radishes, I came across a recipe for White Asparagus with Radish-Leaf Vinaigrette. Serendipity of the delicious variety.
Maybe some of you have been using radish leaves for years. Me, I’ve been profligate. I usually snip them off and leave just an inch or so of stem, so the radishes are easy to pick up and dip into salt. But the leaves … into the compost bin they’d go.
Of course, often radish leaves look they’ve already had a spin in the bin before you get them. If you want to use the leaves to make something delicious, you’ve got to get really fresh radishes with leaves that are so bright and lovely that you’d want to toss them into a salad (which is another good thing you can do with them).
The vinaigrette is fun and is good with lots more than white asparagus (a vegetable that is elusive at best and downright impossible to find when you want them at worst). Try it over hard-boiled eggs or plain chicken breasts, cauliflower, grilled zucchini or artichokes.
Now here’s the funniest part of the radish-leaf experience. The day after I made the vinaigrette, I was flipping through a French food magazine and found a recipe for green puff pastry! And what made it green and savory – radish leaves. Think they could be trending?
This recipe is really just a list of ingredients and really only kind of a recipe. As with so many spur-of-the-moment things, this is a recipe you taste your way through.