Aunt Magpie brought us over a goody bag last week full of delicious things. Pesto, vodka sauce, good champagne, crusty French bread, fresh tortellini, tomatoes, peppers, butter lettuce… and radicchio.
We gleefully put together several drawn-out meals with the goods. We drank the whole bottle of champagne in one sitting. We tossed together a colorful, delicious-looking salad. Atop it sat the shredded radicchio, adding a beautiful maroony-red depth to the palette.
We sat and ate that salad. And discovered something horrifying: we HATE radicchio. Bitter gasp-inducing radicchio. Even more horrifying, we had enough left to make several more salads. I thought, “surely this beautiful veggie has more to offer us? It has such a pleasant name. It sounds so fancy. I would like to be the type of girl who orders something with radicchio in it and say it with a fine Italian accent. Radicchio.”
Off I scampered, to make this fierce leafy veggie more palatable to our obviously uncouth tastes. I tried braising it, I tried roasting it, I tried sauteeing it; I ate it with polenta, with quinoa, with bread, atop things we normally quite like. Still, no dice. The radicchio-love eluded us.
Today, again we sat and ate polenta and quinoa layered with pesto and mozzarella, with a hefty portion of delectable looking balsamic radicchio as the piטce de resistance. Surely with plating like that, radicchio would win us over. After the first bite we set our forks down and thanked God almighty that this was the last bit of the stuff left in our refrigerator. We hunched over with resolve, against the power of our gag reflexes (yes, we uncouth people have strong ones) and finished it. That is the straight story of how we discovered that we despise one of the healthiest and prettiest foods in the world.
We are breaking up with radicchio for good. Goodbye forever! I regret not having fine enough tastebuds for you, bitter friend. Let the veggie gods smile upon us and bless us with many other, more delicious salad toppings.
xo
