Friday, March 16, 2018

Daikon greens

Today a young woman delivered a very large shipment of groceries ordered online. Among the fresh vegetables are two large daikon radishes with their tops. Had I picked them out myself I'd have chosen segments, not entire daikon radishes and I wouldn't have chosen ones with their green tops.

What's a guy to do?

Ask the internet. [daikon tops, edible?] Turns out they are.

YouTube [cook daikon greens]



Dashi pack. I don't have those. But I have the ingredients that go into them. And I already have dashi pre-made to use in miso soup. In fact, I used some today. I like the instructions, "Don't boil too much." 

Americans are so concrete. They'll want the exact number of minutes. 

That was lovely.

The next video uses the ingredients I use for nearly everything. Except they don't list fish sauce. All these ingredients flavor napa cabbage very nicely. And that convinces me this will work. And they'll most likely go well together, napa cabbage and daikon tops. 

I'm not a dandelion salad and carrot top eating kind of guy, but these videos make daikon tops seem not so bad.

I think this is how cooking got started from beginning of time. Humans as scroungers tried everything that they could with every part of every plant they encountered. From root to seed, they made tea, cut up and fried, baked, threw on the fire, ate raw, fermented, steamed, boiled, broiled, braised, and at every stage of plant development from germinated microgreens to seed pods and fruit.

And at each phase they go, "You know, were it not for the hallucinations and that one sudden death accident, with a little soy sauce, this wouldn't be too bad. Lets try drying and smashing the stems next time." 


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