Listening to: “Since She Started to Ride” — Jonathan Richman
I love this time of year, it’s radish season! And it’s the beginning of grilling season! Last night I fixed steak salad (run of the mill — grilled steak, grilled red peppers, romaine lettuce, bleu cheese crumbles, dressing — nothing too mind-blowing there). But I also figured I’d combine a couple of my favorite things: radishes, compound butter, and open flame.
Sweet Fancy Moses. It was good.
First, I made brown butter, sort of. It was quite impromptu, and without getting into a lot of psychoanalysis, let’s just say I don’t care much for measuring stuff, so the below recipe may seem a little “uncorked”.
To make the brown butter:
- brown about 4 Tablespoons of butter (I used the Rosemary compound butter I’d made and frozen earlier in the year) in a skillet
- remove from heat
- if you’re using plain butter, add your rosemary now
- allow butter to cool completely
- add a blob of greek yogurt (confession, I think you’re supposed to use heavy cream, but I didn’t have any. I also don’t think “blob” is a measurement standard, but I’d guess it was in the 3 tablespoon range of blobs)
- add some lemon or lime juice
- add some salt
- whip it together, taste, adjust
Then you’re ready to grill your radishes:
- toss a bunch of cleaned and trimmed whole radishes in the butter mixture
- either grill in a basket or you could just pan-fry them in a skillet until “tender crisp”. I think that means that, unlike the vegetables in a school cafeteria, the vegetables are still recognizable as such.
We used the brown butter on the radishes as a little bit of a sauce, and that was wonderful. And then we dipped a slice of steak in the brown butter… Mind. Blown.
We paired it with Merlot. Some nights our wine and food pairings are dictated strictly by what we have open. Okay, so most nights. And yes, this does mean that sometimes “dinner” for us is standing at the kitchen sink slurping down a bowl of raisin bran and drinking Riesling from a sippy cup. Don’t judge!
