The French figured out a long time ago that the best way to cut the heat of a raw radish is to dip it into softened butter and sprinkle it with salt. They also take it one step further and put it on a baguette, turning it into a light lunch or a snack with wine.
If you’ve never eaten turnips raw before, you will love their slightly peppery, earthy flavor, especially when combined with the radishes and raw asparagus.
The natural bite of the radishes is balanced by fresh basil, orange segments, and a simple citrus dressing.
If you don’t have sugar snaps, the carrots and radishes are great partners à deux, but the peas add a nice texture and make a Palm Beach (Lily Pulitzer) color combination.
This is one of our favorite salads to make at home, and we consider it a meal in itself.
I first tasted this wonderfully fresh salad years ago in a Lebanese restaurant and then recreated my own version.
Sweet and crisp, raw sugar snap peas are hard to resist. In this recipe they are chopped into bite-size pieces and paired with crispy chunks of radish, a bit of mint and crumbles of smooth, creamy, fresh cheese.
These keep in their marinade for about two weeks in the refrigerator, but are best within a couple of hours of pickling.
You will love what happens to radishes and carrots in this pickle -- one turns a sheer sunset pink while the other practically pulsates orange. Chinese pickles are a cook's great cheat. In an elaborate Chinese menu, they save you from having to pull off time-consuming appetizers while they tune up palates for what's to come. Although these pickles are Chinese in origin, they happily pair up with a burger, a bowl of beans, or a plate of grilled chicken.
In Italy, whenever you walk into a store that sells salumi or prepared foods, you will inevitably see some kind of rice salad. It's as ubiquitous as coleslaw is in delis here, and these rice salads can be just as unimpressive—often a half-hearted mix of canned corn, sliced olives, lackluster ham, vegetables, and rice. Still, we've always liked the idea of a rice salad and so decided to come up with a fresher, livelier version, using summer vegetables at their peak—sweet corn, ripe cherry tomatoes, spice radishes, cucumbers, and scallions, with herbs and caciocavallo cheese for complexity. But the biggest departure from the Italian standard is that instead of using the traditional white rice, we toss the vegetables with red rice from the Piedmont region. Red has a much deeper, earthier flavor than white rice and a firmer texture. If you can't find it, try using faro rather than substitution white or brown rice.