New Foods or Don't Throw That Away, You Can Eat It!

So my dad and I were shopping at one of my favorite boutique grocery stores when I ran into a vegetable that I was unfamiliar with. Garlic Spears. Garlic spears or “scapes” are the seed pod of the garlic plant. The spears are cut off when they appear to allow the garlic plant to focus all it’s energy on the bulb rather than on the flower. Often this part of the garlic is just thrown away as a byproduct of garlic production. The spears also came with some instructions: drizzle them with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper and grill until browned. The salesman in the store claimed that they were like french fries. I must say that I was intrigued by this new vegetable. So we made our purchase and brought them home.

 

We decided that we would try the “recipe” on the spears the first time we tried these new veggies. On the grill they went. After they were cooked they looked like this:

 

The flavor was slightly garlicky. The garlic was just a hint in the flavor. They had a texture closer to cooked asparagus, a little fibrous. They were actually very good. Something that we will definitely try again.

This got me thinking though. What other plants have edible parts that we usually discard or just don’t make it to the supermarkets? I started my research, it turns out that many of the leaves from the vegetables we usually eat are also edible and you can find someone on the internet that loves them. Squash leaves are apparently very delicious, as well as the leaves from broccoli and brussels sprouts. The winner in my research however was radish pods. Apparently, if you let your radishes go to seed (something no one does because when you grow radishes you harvest them before they go to seed) they produce hundreds of seed pods that are tasty when you eat them when they are green.

I have now decided that I will let a couple of the radishes that I have been growing go to seed and we will try out the radish pods. Who knew? Radish pods are used frequently in Indian cuisine, but are something that we don’t see here. Radish flowers are also edible. So I think some radish flower and pod salads are in my family’s future. I am sure that these will make it into a blog post in a couple weeks when the radishes mature.