seared radish crostini, round 2

i am positively bubbling over. this week i started my internship at saveur, and can truthfully say that i cannot think of anything i would rather be doing.

i feel weird saying much more about it on the internet, especially since i would just be creepily gushing. but dear god, it is exciting.

that aside, it's also been making me feel re-inspired to cook, which i haven't been so much for the past few weeks. it's not that i don't want to, not that i don't have ideas, but i've been feeling a bit--flighty? distracted? i don't know. a bit too scatterbrained to just hang out and cook, which for me is usually quiet alone wind-down time.

plus i have an encyclopedic list of all the restaurants in new york that i still want to try (and an almost-as-long list of people that i plan on cajoling into buying me dinner). but being in that office, constantly immersed in a cloud of wonderful smells emanating from their glorious test-kitchen, over-hearing clever food-banter (clever! food! banter!), reading article drafts--it's impossible not to be itching to cook by the end of the day.

so today for lunch i made my favorite seared radish crostini à la melissa clark, but this time i tweaked it a bit. i found something called a watermelon radish at the greenmarket the other day and couldn't not take one home with me. for one, look at the damn thing: a sight for winter-bleached eyes. but also, the vendor was cuuute. also again, the explicatory sign was even cuter: "these are radishes, not watermelons."

and accurately so: despite being significantly larger than the french breakfast radish or the cherry belle (mine was the size of a large grapefruit), they have that wonderfully spicy snap to them, that tingling radishy bite that i used to begrudgingly pick out of my salads with a shudder as a child.

oh, speaking of childhood food phobias that i'm totally over: anchovies. i've been eating them for years (anyone who tries to feed me an anchovy-less caesar salad will be scoffed at), but until fairly recently would never have dreamed of cooking with them. i clearly remember opening my father's kitchen cupboard at the tender age of five and all but shrieking in horror at his massive stockpile of jarred anchovies, their clear glass walls allowing for (what seemed at the time) a horrific display of mutilated fish bits suspended in blood-tinged pond scum.

but recently i've been on a pretty serious anchovy bender and am kicking myself for having avoided them all these years. frying them in a little butter with garlic and watching them melt--literally, melt--into a puddle of luscious, umami-rich sauce is one of the most pleasing things you can do in five minutes. (a word of advice: hold the salt; these guys tend to be plenty salty as is.)

my other major tweak to the recipe was to add a teaspoon of toasted fennel seeds to the sauce, because i was thinking about how well fennel gets along with fish and figured i should introduce it to my new found little jarred friends.

the result is unreal: you get the slightly mellowed snap of the watermelon radishes, gone gently sweet around the edges, drizzled with a butter-rich, salty-kicky sauce, and underscored with a toothsome seeded-toast crunch. the whole mess gets punctuated by a generous lemon twang to light up that herbal, floral fennel seed thing--oh my. why i didn't have this for lunch and dinner today is beyond me.

seared radish crostini with fennel anchovy sauce

adapted from melissa clark's recipe for the new york times

serves 2 for a dream lunch

• 1 bunch radishes, or one large watermelon radish
• 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• 1/4 tsp freshly grated pepper
• 6 tbsp butter
• 8 anchovy fillets, finely chopped
• 2 large garlic cloves, minced
• generous pinch red pepper flakes
• 1 tsp fennel seeds (i recommend toasting them in a cast-iron skillet)
  
• 8 thin slices crusty bread, toasted
• lemon wedges, for serving

remove leaves and stems from radishes, trim the tails (or, if using a watermelon radish, quarter the whole thing and then slice each quarter up, lengthwise, into wedges). cut larger radishes lengthwise into sixths and smaller radishes lengthwise into quarters.

place a large skillet over medium-high heat until very hot. add 2 tbsp oil, radishes in a single layer (do not crowd) and black pepper. cook radishes, without moving them, until they are lightly colored on undersides, about 3 minutes. shake pan and continue cooking until tender, about 3 more minutes.

in a small skillet over medium heat, melt butter. stir in anchovies, garlic, red pepper and fennel seeds. reduce heat and simmer about 4 minutes.

brush each slice of toast with sauce and top with several radish wedges. spoon additional sauce on top, sprinkle with additional crushed red pepper, if you like, and a generous squirt of lemon juice. serve with additional lemon wedges.