Sassy Radish

When I was quite young, I was never quite interested in eating. I liked to help out in the kitchen, but when the time came to sit down and eat, I was never hungry. Eating, for the most part, was a chore.

What I always liked to eat, however, were salads. Salads with tons of fresh vegetables – the more, the merrier – and herbs lightly salted and dressed with a bit of sour cream.

Sour cream, you say? Who on earth would do such a thing?

Well, growing up in Russia, we didn’t have salad dressing and used either sour cream or sunflower oil for that purpose. The sour cream made the salad delicate and refreshing, particularly in the summer months when it was hot. (Yes, it gets hot in Russia.)

My favorite salad consisted of cucumbers, dill, scallions, and radishes. It was the radishes that made it so irresistible, so crispy, so delicious. The bite in the radish, not too bitter, not too spicy, made the salad come alive. I was acutely aware of the taste even as a child and crave the flavor combination to this day.

Incidentally, the flavors remind my Indian friends of raita, where the dressing is plain yogurt, not sour cream, but the general result is quite similar.

And so, without further ado, the salad that brings me back to my childhood, summer months, scraped knees, my grandmother’s cooking and all:

The Sassy Radish Cucumber Salad

I’ve talked a lot about starting a food blog. The first dish I ever cooked was a salad. I was five. My mother gave me a small kitchen knife and entrusted me to slice up radishes into the salad bowl. I was hooked from that moment on. On radishes and cooking, that is.

But it wasn’t until I was eleven years old that I started to cook regularly. And as a teenager, I grew into a full-fledge food junkie. And so it only made sense, albeit a bit late in the game, to start a food blog.

However, in my quest to create a blog about food, I realised I also wanted to maintain some focus on things like knitting, sewing and other general crafty projects. Hopefully this site will keep me more diligent about my projects which I tend to start and then abandon. Reading other people’s blogs and seeing their finished projects has served as a certain inspiration.

I cannot write my first entry without thanking the person who made this site look as cool as it does, and who’ll help me tweak it in the next few weeks to make it look even cooler – the Shoestring Decorator! A fantastic friend, a fellow blogger, a crafty woman with limitless talent and creativity, and a web designer extraordinaire, SD has made this site look fun and funky. For which I’m tremendously grateful.

Since I’m keeping this site fairly anonymous, only my alias ‘radish’ will be used. But to decrease the opacity a bit, I’m female in my late twenties, living in New York and working in finance. My interests are as diverse as they get – you might find me on a couch with a book on a Saturday night or watching a football game with friends at a bar, beer in hand. I considered and rejected a career in the food industry – as a chef – because I realised that I only like cooking for the people I love. Which would exclude paying customers – since they are perfect strangers. However, my love and passion for cooking and eating as no less strong than for those in the industry.

So this is my official “Hello, World” equivalent in the universe of food/crafts blogging.