The Japanese Radish

Today, I got a vegetable as a gift. I can see you all now, picturing someone handing me a tiny carrot or a single head of broccoli. Not the case. This vegetable is a Japanese white radish. I think it could easily set some records for its massive size. That’s what she said. Sorry, I couldn't help myself with an opportunity like that. It is about three feet long, easily (that’s what she said, again. Okay, I’m done now.).

Honestly, I just don’t know how to approach this vegetable, much like the nerdy kid in class trying to ask the most popular girl in class out on a date. Actually, since I am trying to chop up and eat it, perhaps that is the wrong analogy. I feel more like a lion observing a giraffe from afar. I desperately want to eat it, but it seems too difficult a task. I feel like I need to call up my lion friends to act as backup in the giraffe ambush.

I think this radish could easily win in a fight against my lone dollar-store kitchen knife. So I am left with a couple of options. Purchase a costly new knife that could actually slice through an enormous radish or spend an hour slowly hacking away at it with the pathetic knife I already own.

GIANT RADISH!

Another teacher suggested that I use it for bicep curls, since the thing easily weighs about 8 pounds. It led to a good deal of laughs in the teacher room when I acted out a radish workout.

Personally, I am holding out hope for a third option: that it magically transforms into a radish spirit like the one in Spirited Away. I refuse to let it rot. I will not allow such an impressive, homegrown vegetable to die in any way other than being digested by me. Perhaps I will just eat it raw, bite-by-bite. That doesn't sound too appealing, so I’ll just keep repeating the mental mantra, “please let it turn into a radish spirit,” over and over in my mind until it happens. That’s totally logical, right?
 

The radish spirit