Daikon Alfredo

In all of my looking around I found two different recipes where they used daikon as pasta.  I was quite intrigued.  My kids love pasta, but I'm not such a huge fan.  The recipe I really wanted to try had yummy tomatoes in it, but again, kids.  They don't like tomatoes in their pasta.  So I decided we would try it with alfredo sauce.  One word, yummy!

Daikon Alfredo

Ingredients:
Daikon
Salted water
2 pieces Bacon, chopped
1/2 onion chopped
2 Tbsp flour
2-3 cups milk
1/2 cup cream cheese (I used that new Philadelphia cooking cream, origional and it was good)
1/2 cup parmesan (I just used the powdered stuff)

Directions:
First, peel daikon.  Then, using the potato peeler cut off slices of daikon into wide "noodles" and put in the salted water.  I watched a chef use his knife and cut around the daikon to make really long noodles, but it didn't work so good for me, use the vegetable peeler.

While the "noodles" are soaking make your alfredo sauce.  First fry your chopped bacon pieces.  I did add some olive oil because I needed enough fats to add the flour to.  I think I used about 1-2 Tbsp oil.  It kinda depends on how fatty your bacon is.  When bacon is almost crispy, add onion and fry until onions are soft.  Add flour and cook for 1 minute more.  Add milk and stir.  I'm not really sure how much milk I added but I think it was 2-3 cups.  Mixture will thicken pretty quickly.  If too thick, add more milk, too thin, well, you added too much.  Once thickened, I added the cream cheese and parmesan cheese.  Stir to melt and blend in.

Take daikon out of water and squeeze extra water out.  Add to Alfredo sauce and stir to coat.  Cook on the stove for only about 1 minute more.  You want your noodles to still be kinda crunchy.  Serve and enjoy.

Verdict:  Okay, I loved this.  I didn't think the daikon was too strong and I liked the texture.  I also served this with some steamed asparagus and the sauce was really good on the asparagus, too.  I mean, how can you go wrong with bacon and cream cheese?  The kids, however, had a difference of opinion.  They liked the sauce, one daughter would suck it off the noodles and then pile the noodles on the side of her plate.  Another just picked out the bacon.  Oh well, I thought it was super good and was glad to eat the leftovers all on my own.