Kalyn’s Kitchen–Roasted Radishes

I’m not often impressed by recipe blogs, but the other day I stumbled across Kalyn’s Kitchen–and the recipes actually made me hungry. Not just one or two of them, either. Here’s a surprising one: roasted radishes with soy sauce and toasted sesame seed. I never would have thought of that (either the roasting of radishes, or the pairing of them with soy sauce and sesame), but it looks absolutely fabulous! Kalyn includes suggestions for recipes to pair it with, as well as notes on which South Beach phases it works with and other blogs’ radish suggestions. Now that’s helpful.

Kinda-sorta in the health vein, last night we were bad and decided to try out a Chinese & Sushi restaurant nearby. The simple fact that it paired Chinese food and Sushi probably should have been warning enough, but oh well. The sashimi was the wrong color and texture, for gods’ sake—raw tuna shouldn’t be grayish. The dried shredded beef dish was way too dry, and the pork in the fried wontons tasted… wrong; anything that can cause me not to eat my fair share of fried wontons is notable indeed (I have a weakness for the things). It was a quiet day and yet the waiter forgot our tea and forgot to wrap our leftovers (not that we’re shedding any tears over that last part). Then I spent an hour and a half in the middle of the night running back and forth to the bathroom, and I don’t think these things are unrelated. We are never going back.

We generally skip really cheap or terrible looking restaurants, so we rarely have truly negative experiences with them. The worst we tend to get is, “you know, that restaurant just isn’t as good as it used to be; let’s stick to this other one instead.” This does, however, remind me of the Chinese restaurant in Boston where we’d gotten delivery and were pouring some dumpling sauce onto a plate only to have a dead roach float out of it. I wish I could say this was before we’d used the sauce at all.

There are supposedly some good Chinese restaurants in the middle of Annapolis where things tend to be more upscale and—god help us—trendy, so we’ll try those next and skip the stuff on the outskirts from now on.