when life gives you lemons....

sure, make you some lemonade. or, make grape juice, and then sit back and watch the world try to figure out how you did it. OR, just throw them at mean people.

but what do you do when life gives you radishes? a pile of baby daikon ones, to be precise.



first of all, the mountain of radish greens that were attached to the comparatively small pile of tubers could not just go into the compost bin. no ways! they just happen to be premium roughage, high in vitamin C and also a good source of folic acid, potassium and molybdenum (a healthy trace mineral). koreans usually use them for kimchi, but it was decided that the easiest way to deal with them was to blanch and freeze them all for future use (in soups, as a side, etc.).

whew! that done w/. on w/ the radish part. my favorite thing to do w/ daikon is to make a bunch of daikon cakes (delicious!), enough to freeze a batch. however, the radishes that we just harvested from the garden were quite small... some only the size of my pinky finger. so, i went w/ do chua, which literally translates to "pickled stuff" in vietnamese.

making do chua is quite simple: just julienne the daikon and some carrot. add salt, leave sit, rinse w/ cold water, cram it into a jar and then fill it to the top w/ a brine of sugary vinegar.


my reason for loving do chua is because i'm madly in love w/ banh mi, of which do chua is a key ingredient. it's like the best sandwich on earth, trust me. and i do it up veggie-yum-style w/ a marinated & fried tofu.




take a toasted torpedo roll (or baguette), smear some mayo on the insides, put sliced cucumbers, some bitter greens and the tofu on one side and then a hefty layer of do chua and fresh cilantro on the other. drizzle on some sweet chili sauce and sriracha, then go to heaven. :)

my toaster oven did this

roasted radishes with garlic, rosemary and olive oil (like potatoes, but better). ....AND pumpkin mini-muffins (vegan). success.

harvest; tuber time

it's been mighty nippy outside these days. well, it's actually been o.k. this past week... you know, mild autumn weather.. a nice sweater and a thin jacket.. maybe a scarf. but there were a couple of days that were just FREEZING. and i thought i was gonna die. anyway, we decided we should head out to the garden one last time to harvest what was left; what survived the freeze anyway.
daylight is growing shorter w/ each day, so we had to book it to the garden on our bikes straight after school. we knew that we'd only have a couple of hours, at most, before dark. when we got there, it was a bit sad. it was obvious that the gardening season was over. folks were harvesting their cabbage to make enough kimchi to last god knows how long and they wouldn't be planting anything else. our little garden was barely hanging on. all of the basil was dead; wet, brown drooping leaves. we were just a couple of days late. so we started uprooting all the tubers (beets, radishes and carrots) and harvesting huge piles of herbs and greens. getting it all home on our bikes was a bit of a challenge but we made it.
so then i had all that stuff to deal w/. just washing it all took forever. now i have enough greens to have huge, amazing salads for dinner this week. as for the other stuff, i found some good recipes for daikon radish and beets and i set aside one whole evening for that magic. the outcome was daikon kimchi, do chua (vietnamese pickled vegetables) and, my new favorite, daikon cakes. YUM. as for the other stuff, the herbs are drying & i'm gonna make some herbed radish butter and i'll roast some of the beets (but i mostly like them fresh on salads). damn, having a garden has been good. :)