CSA Week 4 - June 28th - daikon cake part 1

Another trip to CAM International Market for Chinese sausage, dried shrimp, and rice flour provided me with everything I needed to make daikon cake (aka turnip cake, aka radish cake). Kelly suggested I make this dish a few weeks back and I was excited to be trying a brand new dish with techniques I've never used and ingredient combinations I've never tried. I am so thankful that her culinary repertoire includes a lot of vegetables (like daikons) that I don't seek out or use regularly in my cooking. For example, she just told me about sun dried daikons today. 

I followed the recipe pretty closely, though scaled it to 2/3 to account for the amount of roots I was working with (about 1 pound). I used a combination of daikons, salad turnips, and a kohlrabi. My only real ingredient modification was increasing the amount of green onion (I used the six I had in the fridge from the CSA and grocery store). I ended up adding 1/4 tsp. salt to the mix. 

I ran the cut up roots through the food processor as chunks until they were all slightly larger than a mince (I'm sure this size has a name; I'm still working on learning my traditional French cuts). The recipe suggests grating then chopping using different disks, but I don't have this kind of food processor. 

The "good stuff" (sausage, shrimp, and green onion) got cooked before adding the roots and cooking them all together for about 25 minutes, then mixing with rice flour and transferring to a cake pan.

For the steaming I set the cake pan in a vegetable steamer basket in a wide pot. Adding water throughout steaming was a little tricky, but otherwise it worked great. The cake doesn't really firm up during steaming as the recipe suggests, but it does as it cools. Forty-five minutes seemed right.

I am chilling the cake now and will cut it up, pan fry it, and make a sauce for it tomorrow for dinner. Stay tuned! 

I composted the beet greens today. I let them sit in the fridge too long and some were starting to rot. I had enough to do without blanching greens today and, more importantly, I had (have...) more than enough dirty dishes already. 

Leftovers - 1 head cabbage (we're planning on making sauerkraut once we get a head from week 5), a few carrots and beets, and some green bean hummus.