What the F I do with a ton of radishes.

Only part of the ton.

If you're like me (and, hey, in my self-absorbed world, everyone is like me), your culinary skills can only imagine so much with a giant pile of radishes.

To me, radishes = salad or taco topping. Done. That is all one does with radishes.

And then one becomes a member of a farm share and fills one's crisper with radishes every week to the point where they're even edging out the prolific beets and carrots and it all starts to get a little cozy and root vegetable-y in there.

Every week I stare at the new pile of radishes and think, "Dude. Something must be done about all these fucking radishes.", and then I add them to the crisper bag with the old hundred radishes and go on with my life in which I eat every other vegetable known to man except radishes until the next week's share arrives and, alas, I'm faced again with a dose of radishes until the pile becomes insurmountable and something drastic must be done. Or else. Dun dun duuuuuuuuun.

Yes, I have vegetable drama.

Well, last week was the height of Radish Insurmountability because the bag in which I had been storing my weekly radish ration became full. I could no longer twist the top and put it back in the crisper to forget for another week of life.

Panic.

Because, really, what the F do you do with a ton of radishes?

Well, if you're me, you do nothing and hope they'll magically disappear from your crisper. OR you wait until the cleaning lady comes again and you sneak a bunch into the bag of tomatoes you're also passing off. Or you start accepting invitations only to parties where someone will let you bring a salad so that you can slice all your radishes into a giant salad of nothing but radishes, not even caring if they never invite you back because HAHA! you'll be free of the radishes.

But you certainly don't do anything useful to resolve the issue because that would be too sensible and grown-up.

Let it be known that I employ the "Ignore it and it will go away." rule to most issues that arise in my daily life. It's very mature and effective, I assure you.

Thankfully, fate and Farmgirl stepped in to solve this problem for me in that I subscribe to Farmgirl's feed via email and, on Sunday, her feed email contained a recipe for "...What to do with radishes..."

It's like that chick reads my mind.

The recipe was for a dip. A refreshing radish spread dip that's good and has feta in it and you can eat it with this, that and the next thing except I didn't care because the recipe said it used 2 cups of radishes and that alone sounded amazing.

WOW! With 2 cups of room in my radish bag, imagine how great my life would be! I could put other things in the crisper like lettuce or my bra! I could hide presents for Bubba in there or crawl in there and make a fort from the carrots! It would be miraculous!

I will make this amazing and delicious sounding dip. Even if the other ingredients are dog doo and old hair.

My guests are so lucky.

And since we were having the All Pie for Pie Season dinner celebration that night and I'd yet to devise an appropriate pie -themed appetizer (feel free to suggest some), I decided that this radish and dog doo dip would serve as such, even though I had no plans to make it in pie form. Or from doody. Maybe next year!

Well, the excitement only continued when I actually read through the ingredients and, after finding that it did not actually involve dog doo, old hair or anything remotely disgusting, I was overjoyed to see that it did call for a good amount of scallions, parsley and lemon juice and could be served all crudite-style with all manner of vegs.

Hey! We have those! And their bags are getting awful full, too! YAY! I won't have to pretend my carrots or cucumbers are going to disappear from the crisper now! Won't this be a magical week free of fruitless pretending!

Also, this recipe calls for "whizzing", which means I can use My Beloved while dispatching a crisperful of vegs. DREAMY! Also dreamy is that "whizzing" didn't involve the relieving of anyone's bladder in my dip.

Pee-free is how I prefer my foods. For the record.

It wasn't that kind of party.

I continued to find dreamy details in this recipe as I worked through it. Like, I was able to dump a good amount of vegs, including a ton of radishes, right into the Cuisinart with very little prep. Like, I just cut off the root and stem ends of the radishes and threw them in there with whole stalks of scallions (sans roots) and a bunch of parsley leaves and hit "On".

Radish magic.

LOVE THAT.

Then I squooze a brick of cream cheese into the thing, added the feta, salt, lemon juice and pepper and hit "On".

Dip magic.

LOVE THAT, TOO.

And when it was all plated with a ton of carrot sticks, squash wedges and cucumber slices? Well, it made me so happy I ate a ton.

Appetizer magic.

And then I started to rethink my low-grade animosity toward the boring Radish. Why don't I ever do anything with these radishes? It's not like they taste bad. They taste fine. And, hey, didn't one of my TV boyfriends say something about the French eating radishes with cold butter and salt? I think I would like that. If it were a sandwich. On a baguette. I think I will eat that right now. Here I go...

And that is what the F I did with a ton of radishes. I made a dip, which is nearly gone, and had 3 radish sandwiches over the course of 2 days.

And wouldn't you know that my avoidance of the crisper has subsided and I'm now able to open that drawer (which, in and of itself is an accomplishment) without having to avert my eyes from the bulging radish bag in shame.

The fact that I'm now in the habit of dragging radishes through the butter as though it's a dip is not important because we're eating the fucking radishes and that is the point.