There's Another One...

...Another vegetable I can take off my "don't like list" and start cooking with it! As I've posted before, I'm trying to purge the words "don't like" from my vocabulary when it comes to food. I've also posted about my love of vintage and antique cookbooks. Both have come together in my new cooking adventure: radishes.

My current challenge is to avoid grocery shopping until I've made every balanced meal I can with what I have.

I had only encountered radishes before in salads, and I never could stand them. Then my mother came to visit last week. Her fiance always generously sends along a bag of groceries. I never know what he'll send, be he generally includes lots of produce, some bread, and some dessert. It's lovely, but it generally makes me stretch myself with my cooking, as he often sends produce I've never used before. This time, it was a bag of radishes--about two bunches worth, no greens.

Enter The Art of Chinese Cooking (1972), a cookbook my mother gave to me when I started keeping house. I chose to try Beef with Radishes, a sweet-and-sour dish. We had it for dinner tonight, served over rice, and it was a huge hit! Even DS E asked for seconds!

Here's the recipe:

Dredge 1/2 lb beef sliced very thin and cut in small pieces with mixture of 2 T soy sauce and 2T corn starch. Prepare sweet-sour sauce by combining 2T oil, 3T vinegar, 6T water, 1/2c sugar, and 1T corn starch; cook for a few seconds. Add the dredged meat and cook until meat is done (a few minutes [covering the pan helps the meat cook without the sauce getting too thick]).
[Once the meat is done] add 8 sliced radishes. Do not cook the radishes but heat them thoroughly. Serve hot. Serves 4.

I'm so glad I tried this recipe! I had enough radishes that I doubled the recipe and used more radishes than straight doubling would have called for. Having added so many radishes to the dish relative to the meat, Beef with Radishes made an excellent single dish meal.

The real perk of all this, though, is that radishes are so inexpensive. The stores near me usually put them on sale alongside cilantro and green onions. I never buy cilantro or green onions for more than $0.50 per bunch, and sometimes they go on sale for a quarter a bunch! Since one bunch of radishes or green onions is enough for dinner for the four of us, that's a really good deal!

I'm definitely going to make this recipe again, and I'm going to start playing with other recipes for radishes.

For more recipes and ideas, check out Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family!