I have to admit it, I'm not the biggest fan of radishes. As a homegrown crop they do have their advantages though - mostly that they are about the quickest thing from which you can get a harvest (usually about 4 weeks from sowing to eating). For this reason they are great for introducing newcomers (and children) to the thrill of harvesting your own veggies, and I personally find them useful sown as a 'catch crop' between rows of slower growing plants to make the most use of the available space.
Luckily for me, IB is a big radish fan who is happy to eat as many radishes as we can grow, so it all works out. He's so keen he even asked me whether we could add the leaves to a salad as well as the roots, but the coarseness and hairiness of the leaves is frankly pretty off-putting from a 'mouthfeel' perspective. As with nettles, cooking will take care of the prickly hairs, so you could eat them as a cooked vegetable or in soup. But the solution I found is so tasty that so far we haven't cooked a single radish leaf. Instead we have been eating Radish Leaf Pesto - absolutely delicious with a slice of IB's home made bread, still warm from the oven.
If you Google Radish Leaf Pesto, you will find many recipes. But here is my extremely adaptable 'whatever you have in the store cupboard' version.
Moonroot's Radish Leaf Pesto
Ingredients:
1-2 handfuls of radish leaves*
1 garlic clove
A handful of toasted nuts (almonds, cashews, pistachios etc) or seeds (pumpkin, sunflower etc)
30g grated Parmesan or Grana Padano cheese**
Olive oil (or vegetable oil of your choice - it might be interesting to try a nutty-flavoured oil like sesame)
Generous squeeze of lemon juice
Pinch of salt
Method
Place radish leaves, garlic, nuts/seeds and cheese in bowl of food processor and whizz them together. Trickle in some olive oil and whizz the machine again. You'll probably need to keep stopping to scrape the mixture down towards the blades from the sides of the bowl. Add more oil if necessary to get the right consistency - but remember it's easy to add more if you need it but impossible to take it out if you add too much, so add a little at a time. When it's nearly there, squeeze in some lemon juice, and add salt to taste. Give it a final whizz and there you are.
Enjoy with fresh bread, on toast or crackers, with vegetable crudites, on pasta...
According to all the Radish Leaf Pesto recipes online, it freezes really well. But I wouldn't know, it never lasts long enough round here to get frozen!
* If I don't have enough leaves from that day's radish harvest I keep them with their cut ends in a jar of water until I have harvested some more a couple of days later. And at times I have supplemented the radish leaves with any salad leaves that are starting to bolt - rocket, mizuna etc (in fact if you don't have any radish leaves you could use just salad leaves, as in Jack Monroe's excellent 'Salad Bag Pesto' recipe). Or you can adjust the quantities of the other ingredients too and just end up with a smaller amount of pesto!
** As IB is strictly vegetarian, Parmesan or Grana Padano are off the menu for us (both contain animal rennet). We use a vegetarian version of Parmesan when we have it (usually labelled something like 'vegetarian hard cheese' in supermarkets). During lockdown, as we didn't have any vegetarian Parmesan available I experimented by using a strong mature Cheddar instead. This is no doubt absolute heresy in foodie circles, but... it tasted fine. Different but fine.
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