Sunday, June 7, 2015

A visit to the garden!

After hiking yesterday, my friend let me wander into her mom's garden and harvest some vegetables to take home.  How nice!

I was fascinated by how little cucumbers and zucchinis are actually the "fruit" of the plants and they ave female flowers on their butts.  They only start growing bigger if fertilized by the male flowers, so hopefully next time I'll get to try help out with that!  (can you find the baby zucchini below?)

In addition to getting to take home some cucumbers and tomato, I was super excited about the white radishes.  I'm not really sure what kind they are, but they're small and round with lots of leafy greens, and they were growing half in the dirt and half out of the dirt!

I took them home and gave them a good washing before roasting them!

Delicious with flaky sea salt.

Adapted from April Bloomfield's 'a girl and her greens' book:
Roasted whole tokyo turnips recipe

16 whole tokyo turnips with leaves still attached
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 teaspoons flaky sea salt

Preheat oven to 425 F.
Halve each turnip lengthwise (since my white radishes were bigger and of different sizes, I tried to cut them into pieces roughly the same size to make sure they cooked evenly)
Run under water to get rid of all the grit on the outside and inside the base of the greens.
Pat dry.
Pour the oil (I used bacon grease because I've been saving it in the fridge in a jar) into an ovenproof skillet, and set over medium high heat until smoking.
Put the turnips flat side down and cook until light golden brown (5-8 mins).
Make sure the greens are tucked into the pan and put it into the oven.
Roast until tender (you can insert a sharp knife with no resistance), turning occasionally so the greens wilt and crisp up evenly, and making sure the turnips don't get too brown in places.
Recipe said it should take 20-25 mins in the oven, it only took me ~10.  Maybe my pieces were smaller?
Remove from oven, and sprinkle on some salt to taste.

I think I got pretty darn close.  Here's the pic from the book:

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