From the Garden - Spicy Radish Dip

Radishes are one of the fastest maturing crops in the garden.  You can plant them and in no time at all they are ready to harvest.  Radishes are good sliced thin in salads.  We've even pickled some.  But our favorite way to eat radishes are in a quick and easy, tasty and spicy fresh garden dip.  The bushy greens in the photo down below is our mini patch of radishes.  And they are ready - past time for being ready, actually.

The first item in the radish row isn't a radish, though.  It's a celery plant.  This is the first celery I've been able to grow from seed in the garden.  We've grown some from cuttings from a store-bought one, but this one grew from a seed.  Come to think of it, this celery would be excellent for using in the dip we're making today.

I'm going to pull out four of the biggest radishes for our dip.  There's a big, fat one right there.

I wash them off and then throw the greens to the cows, goats and chickens.  

I was about to go in when I noticed that two of our 300 onions had gone to flower.  See them?

I pulled them up as I've learned that once onions go to flower, you should pull them and eat the bulbs as quickly as possible as they don't last or store well.  I chopped off the tops of these little Red Creole onions.  I have a plan for them.

I cubed up the radishes and put them in the old food processor.

Along with the radishes, we dropped some fresh parsley, four cloves of garlic and I decided to add one of the Creole onions as a new addition to the dip.

In a bowl, we softened a block of cream cheese and added jalapeno pepper powder and more minced onion.

I sliced up some Atomic Red Carrots and Some Uzbek Yellow carrots that we had just pulled.  We'll use these for dipping into the radish dip.

We folded the cream cheese mixture into the radish mixture and stirred up read good.

Spicy Radish Dip, ready for the taste test...

Delicious!  Only thing I'd change is (believe it or not) NOT putting the onions in the dip.  It didn't taste bad.  It tasted good, but it changed the ordinarily creamy dip into a chunky dip.  The texture just wasn't the same.  Tricia and I ate this dip yesterday evening.  The bowl of radish dip with fresh carrots didn't make it 24 hours before we were cleaning the bowl.  It's time to make some more.