Taproot Green Adventures

An explanation. A few days ago, while planning my evening meal, I yearned for those halcyon days of cohabitation with Jess and Colin, and recalled in particular a soup of radish greens I had once made during that period. And so, in a feeble effort to channel the memory into something productive, I embarked on an exploration of the sometimes forgotten, yet delicious, uses of radish greens—and beet greens, since I had some of those too.

Grocery stores typically sell the taproots of these two plants--the bulbous, tapering underground portions that go great in salads and stir-fries. Sometimes, if you're lucky, these come with stems and leaves attached. In the past I've thrown these away, not knowing any better, but in Colorado I learned that these parts of the plant can be delicious, too.

My goal here is to find a bunch of inventive ways to eat them instead of tossing them in the compost.

The greens of beet (on the right, above) look pretty much like what American grocery stores call Swiss chard. In fact, chard (the kind people call "Swiss Chard"--as far as I know, the only kind) and garden beets (the ones we usually eat) are actually subspecies of the same plant. The exact ancestral connection is apparently a subject of heated debate, but basically, chard is a beet cultivated for leafiness instead of rootiness.

One alternate name for chard, by the way, is "perpetual spinach."

Radish (whose greens are on the left, above) comes from the same family as mustard and cabbage. Accordingly, the greens have a tangy, bitter taste when raw. They need a good wash because their gritty leaves hang on to dirt—they'll still be gritty after you wash them, but they're good to go.

Radish greens turn to green muck fairly quickly, but if you put them in soup, no one will know! Therefore, taproot green use #1 is cream of radish green and beet green soup (recipe). Tastes better than it looks in the picture. More uses soon.