Cooking with Radish Pods

Ok, here's another recipe you're only going to use if you have a vegetable garden.  Once the weather warms up, radish plants will not form a radish root; they bolt and produce a tall stalk that blooms.  I found out this year that you can eat every part of a radish plant, including the flowers and the seed pods they produce.  A little research found an Indian recipe for fried radish seed pods and another for pickling them for use in salads.  This is a real ingredient!  You can also eat them raw, or save them to plant the seeds next year.

The radishes were sharing a large pot with the garlic.  I decided to plant some kind of squash there for the summer, so it was time to pull a few garlic and harvest the radish pods.

I ended up with just under a cup of radish pods of varying maturity.  When I tasted a few, the youngest tasted the most like a radish.  The bigger ones didn't taste like much, but I was going to do stuff to them anyway.

First up, I pickled half of them.  Quarter cup of red wine vinegar, half a teaspoon each of kosher salt and sugar, and a few tarragon leaves from the plant that I grew and never seem to use.  Boil, pour over the pods, seal, and refrigerate until ready to use.  You can swap for different vinegars and herbs.  I was going to be having them in a salad with beets, so the red wine and tarragon made sense.

The other half were to put on the gnocchi that evening.  I added a couple of tablespoons of oil to a skillet over medium and fried them, lightly sprinkled with salt.  At the last minute, I added the remnants of some pesto, stirred into a uniform sauce, and tossed with the gnocchi.

Even if you never cook with a radish pod, keep in mind the parts of your produce that you're throwing away.  Any root vegetables that are sold with the leaves attached, the leaves are edible.  Squash seeds can be roasted just like pumpkin seeds.  Corn cobs can be simmered into broth.  The list goes on.  Think of creative ways to get more out of your food dollar and garden.