Radishes

Combining radishes and butter is common in France, where radishes are often enjoyed prior to the meal to stimulate the palate.  The idea of eating a radish with butter may seem odd, but the trick is having freshly harvested radishes and a high quality butter.  The radishes in our garden have just reached the perfect stage where their roots are dense and developed but their leaves remain small and tender.  A few feet away a stand of volunteer wild radish is covered in an array of pastel blossoms and chile-shaped seed pods.  

I decided to pay tribute to this classic European recipe with an amuse bouche that combined young radish leaves, radishes, wild radish blossoms and pickled radish seeds with shaved goats milk butter, meyer lemon and sea salt.