Making Radish Chips with our First Harvest

I have some posts composed in my mind, but have not gotten myself to write them down and hit publish lately. Look, there are auctions of American Girl doll clothes to monitor on ebay, episodes of the Real Housewives of New Jersey to watch, and my latest favorite thing, longform.org to read (which scares the pants off me nightly...it's a horrifying world).

We did something fun today though, and worthy of sharing. We picked our first harvest of the season, a bunch of very pretty and spicy radishes. This variety is called Easter Egg for the lovely scarlett, pink, and ivory colors of the radishes. I like the way radishes taste, but the really fun thing about growing them with the girls is how quickly they go from seed to pretty round radish. We planted this square foot of them a month ago!

While Josephine would need to be medicated to put one of these delicate little things to her lips, she really enjoys picking them with me. She and Tess came out this morning and we pulled them. They grew much better than they did last year, which I attribute to my actually reading the square foot gardening book, rather than just having it around for looks. I only planted sixteen seeds in the square foot so I didn't have to do any thinning, which I think really messed up the roots last year. We still had a few long skinny radishes, but most of them got nice and round and plump. They are really spicy! I wanted to try something different with them, so we made radish chips, using this recipe (essentially you steam the radish for 5 minutes and then sprinkle the sliced radish with paprika, a little cayenne, and salt, and bake for 20 minutes).  Pretty yummy! They were small, but very tasty. They would be good sprinkled on a baked potato, or anything else that could benefit from a small, salty, crunchy condiment. I cannot wait to watch our tomatoes, peppers, borage, cucumbers, and squash (among a few other things) grow this year. 

A few of our radish chips