.: evil jungle prince :.

I'm marking this year as my final attempt at growing Korean radishes. For whatever reason, they just don't like the climate here in the southern California desert -- I imagine it gets too hot during the day for them, even in the middle of our winters (usually 70F at around mid-day). Sigh! How I would love to grow my own for kimchi and other purposes, but it's just not in the cards. I have such a fetish for Korean radishes: those beautiful, globular canon-balls of the vegetable world with their gorgeous green skull-caps. I can barely contain myself when I see them in a Korean grocery store, always with an overwhelming desire to put them all in my cart and take the whole lot home. (I know -- this doesn't sound healthy at all and I'm the first to admit it.) But as to my own radish cultivation efforts, it's the same thing every year -- for a while the seedlings do wonderfully and then... nothing else, with no establishment of an actual radish root.

So this year I decided to eat my mistakes and make sure the radish leaves did not go to waste. As I pulled out the failed seedlings I at once heard a fellow blogger's voice (KT) say: "Don't you dare throw out those radish leaves!" I abided by her trans-continental advice and prepared them according to her recipe, creating a tasty banchan to accompany rice.

1. First I chopped the radish leaves roughly.

2. Next I sauteed them in a little sesame oil briefly, adding just a bit of sugar, soy sauce, and sesame seeds.

So simple and so tasty. Now I feel rather silly for having wasted so many radish leaves in my lifetime.

But since we're talking radishes, here's a North Korean video on my favorite kimchi, kkaktugi. I'm sure you'll want to get up and dance all around just like I did. Kim Jong Il is just the hippest video-director ever, isn't he?