Cherry Tomato Kitchen Diary

This spring, I was lucky enough to find cherry radishes at the local street market. Cherry radish isn’t a common ingredient in traditional cooking here, so it’s unusual to find it in Taiwanese markets. I was inspired to use it to enhance a traditional recipe.

This recipe is based on a Taiwanese cabbage salad dish, but with a choice of two different dressings. So you can enjoy a very Taiwanese flavor, or an Italian flavor.

Ingredients

300g Chinese cabbage, shredded, 0.2cm

100g Cherry radish, thinly sliced, 0.1cm

A bunch of coriander, chopped

A bunch of fennel, chopped

2-3 garlic pieces (cloves), crushed

4 -5 tablespoons roasted peanuts

Enough salt

Taiwanese dressing

2 tablespoons white roasted sesame oil

2 tablespoons rice vinegar

Italian dressing

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

Kitchen Diary

1. Sprinkle enough salt on the prepared ingredients, and then mix with the Taiwanese dressing, or the Italian dressing. Leave it for 5 minutes – it should taste very crunchy.

2. This dish can be kept in the fridge for 1-2 days. It will still taste crunchy, but a lot more juicy.

3. In Taiwan, we would only add coriander in this dish, but I found a little fennel adds a good aroma to it. So you could use either coriander, or fennel, or both.

4. In Taiwan, we usually use roasted garlic-flavored peanuts, but as long as the peanuts are roasted, it’s OK. It should also be fine to add some other kinds of nuts.

5. Instead of using white sesame oil, sometimes we use extra virgin tea seed oil (it’s also called camellia oil).

6. Instead of red wine vinegar, you can use white wine vinegar.
This dish’s taste is usually more acid, so I would not recommend using aged balsamic vinegar.