Roasted Chicken Salad with Radish Greens Dressing

Sunday afternoon I stood at the kitchen table with the days tasks laid out before me. I had been to the farmer's market the previous day and had a special delivery of fresh produce from Ken Keppers that morning.  All of that, in addition to the few things I could salvage from my own neglected garden amounted to an afternoon of prep work; a pile of grape leaves to can for wintertime stuffed grape leaves, rose petals and coriander seeds to dry, a huge bowl of strawberries freshly picked and still warm from the sun to nibble while I cook, a huge head of lettuce with leaves that just needed to be cleaned and put in the fridge for this weeks lunches - chicken wraps and salads, lovely red beets to be roasted and served with our pork chops at dinner tonight along with the beet greens sautéed with onions and bacon, a huge head of cabbage and some breakfast radishes.  I had a plan for everything except the cabbage and radishes. I considered trying my hand at fermenting the cabbage but I didn't have the crock or supplies and really wanted to get everything prepped that day so I decided on a simple cole slaw. That would be nice with the radishes sliced into it, but what about those radish greens?  Should I add them to the salad? to the slaw? or just feed them to the pigs?  I did a quick Google search and found a few recipes for radish green pesto. I thought I'd give that a try, with a few modifications of course.  Well...

Eliminating the nuts was one thing, since I'm allergic to nuts, but discovering I didn't have any parmesan cheese was pushing it for a pesto. Then I accidentally added a little too much liquid and the whole plan changed. Luckily I love to improvise. And I'm pretty good at it.  What I ended up with was a fantastic dressing for my cabbage. Tonight I served it tossed with some of the lettuce and topped with leftover roasted chicken and radish slices.  I'm thinking that it will end up in some sort of asian noodle dish with the remainder of the leftover chicken tomorrow and possibly sauteed with the leftover pork chop and served over rice later in the week. Let me know in the comments if you have other ideas for it.

Ingredients:

Greens from 1 bunch of radishes - washed & stems removed

1/4 cup lemon juice

1/4 cup olive oil

2-3 large cloves of garlic (or about 3 tbsp chopped)

salt to taste

water

Combine all of the ingredients in a blender or food processor and blend until it is liquified - add water  if needed until it is the desired consistency. It's that easy.