Of Radishes and Garlic Scapes

Being a market gardener surely inspires some unusual meals. We have access to all that lovely home-grown organic produce, but what we really end up eating is damaged crops (think split tomatoes or the potato the shovel went through), or whatever’s left over at the end of the market. A few weeks ago, the only thing the garden was producing was radishes and garlic scapes. Some a.m. thunderstorms kept customers away from the market, so we had a LOT of radishes and garlic scapes leftover.

Radishes weren’t too hard to deal with. We ate them:

• Out of hand, with sea salt
• Shredded with cabbage and carrots in a "Health Salad" (we had bought a lovely organic cabbage at the market)
• Oven roasted (OK, I admit, this recipe still needs some work)

The traditional French way of eating them, by the way (especially the long breakfast radishes), is with butter and salt. I have yet to try them this way, but I did find an article about it on the Internet.

On to the scapes. If you are not familiar with garlic scapes, the scape is the flower stalk of the garlic plant. They are only available for a limited time in the spring. Since we grow a lot of garlic, we have a lot of scapes. I don’t mind, because they are yummy!

All of the following got two thumbs up from Greg:

• Roasted in the oven with olive oil and salt. (Customers tell us they are also great on the grill.)
• As garlic scape pesto (using the recipe from MaryJanesFarm).

The real winner was when I substituted scapes for asparagus in the "Sausage and Asparagus Skillet" recipe from one of my favorite cookbooks, Simply in Season. I also added some chopped fennel. Made with Evermore Farms pork sausage from the market, this was so good we’ve had it several times!