As I write this, it is 100° F in Portland, Oregon, which is neither normal nor acceptable. At some point I am definitely planning on making Peace Soup (from Back to the Rock episode 112, “Into the Trash”), but the absolute last thing I want to do right now is fill my house with more heat; that’s an attempt for some lovely crisp October day. Instead, I picked a few easy, cold recipes that require no cooking and might appear at a summer picnic, thanks in large part to the list of Boober Fraggle’s recipes on Muppet Wiki.
Radish-ade
(From Back to the Rock episode 109 “The Giggle Gaggle Games“)
This is presumably something akin to lemonade but made with radishes. As I discovered while making real Doozer sticks, radishes have a lot of moisture, so I figured getting radish juice would be relatively simple. I grated up 1 bunch of radishes, put the pulp in several layers of paper towels, and squeezed out 1/4 C of very pretty hibiscus-pink radish juice (the grated radish I saved for the other recipes). This tasted just like raw radishes, as expected.
Adding sugar directly to the radish juice did help it taste more like something you could call radish-ade, but it still wasn’t good. I didn’t have any lemons in the house, but I did have a bottle of lemon juice, and that + water = basically fresh lemon juice, right? (Look, it was 100°, and I was not venturing outside again just because I forgot to buy lemons.) Adding the lemon juice obviously required adding more sugar as well, and you know what I discovered to my surprise? It wasn’t bad!
When I tried again with the pre-made raspberry lemonade I had in the fridge, it was even better. The spicy-vegetal flavor of the radishes blended well with the sweet-tartness of lemons and raspberries. You could recognize it if you knew it was there, but you would never be able to guess if you didn’t know. The whole experience felt very “You know, if you put enough sugar in this stuff, it tastes just like ginger ale!”
- Taste: 3/5 radishes
- Ease: 4/5 radishes
- Ability to blend in with Silly Creature culture so your normie friends don’t know this is from Fraggle Rock: 3/5 radishes (4/5 if you don’t tell anyone there’s radish juice in the lemonade, -1/5 if you do)
Radish dip
(From original series episode 318, “Bored Stiff”)
This one felt like cheating, because all I did was google “radish dip” and then follow this recipe by Sue from The View From Great Island:
- 3/4 cup sour cream
- 1/2 cup mayonnaise
- 1/8 tsp salt
- 1 1/2 cups radishes, very thinly sliced. You can use a mandoline slicer for this because it slices the radishes paper thin, but a sharp knife will work fine.
- 1/2 cup green onion, trimmed and thinly chopped. Use the white and green parts.
- fresh cracked black pepper, to taste
I used half freshly chopped radishes and half grated-and-dried-out radishes from the radish-ade. The dip ended up being super good with either pita chips or celery sticks. You should definitely try this one!
- Taste: 4.5/5 radishes
- Ease: 4.5/5 radishes
- Ability to blend in with Silly Creature culture: 5/5 radishes
Wembley’s Wonderful Whoopie Water
(From the original series episode 402 of the same name)
Here’s what we know about Wembley’s Wonderful Whoopie Water:
- It makes a sound like “pukka pukka” when it’s flowing through the rocks
- It’s fizzy
- It tastes like strawberries (with a hint of clove, according to Boober)
- It keeps Fraggles awake all night
- It can cause a cave-in if you take too much of it!
Fortunately, strawberry-flavored seltzer water is available at most grocery stores nowadays. But you know what’s not available anywhere near me or even online? Caffeinated seltzer water that’s only strawberry-flavored. They’ve got strawberry citrus, strawberry hibiscus, strawberry kiwi, you name it, but not just plain strawberry, and definitely not strawberry with a hint of clove.
So I just went the DIY route and bought unflavored caffeinated seltzer water, strawberries, and whole cloves. I studded one strawberry with cloves, sliced up a few more strawberries, added them to a glass until it was about half full (or half empty, if you’re Boober), and filled the glass with seltzer.
Y’all, this was good. The longer you let it steep as you slowly sip, the more flavor you get. I was worried that the clove would be intrusive, but it was just enough to add a subtle, interesting spice so it wasn’t just the single flavor note.
When you’re just left with a glass of soggy strawberry slices, this made me think that for a grownup version you could absolutely replace the seltzer with champagne (and then end up with boozy strawberries at the end, which I always enjoy).
- Taste: 4.5/5 radishes
- Ease: 5/5 radishes
- Ability to blend in with Silly Creature culture: 5/5 radishes
Radish shakes
(From Back to the Rock episodes 106 and 107, “The Legend of Icy Joe” and “Flight of the Flutterflies”)
Dear reader, I say this because I care about you:
Do not do this thing.
It is bad. It is a waste of ice cream, milk, and radishes. Maybe Boober has some secret recipe that could turn this into something edible, but I do not, not even in my FunkoPop Fraggle Rock mug.
- Taste: “nope”/5 radishes
- Ease: “meh”/5 radishes
- Ability to blend in with Silly Creature culture: “why”/5 radishes
Click here to plan your Fraggle picnic on the ToughPigs forum!
By Beth Cook
