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Easy Homemade Horseradish
Spring may be the time when we need a potent jolt to wake us out of our winter nesting mode and fully recover from the shift to daylight savings time. Fortunately, spring is the time of year we can find horseradish roots for sale in markets. To me, the roots look like overdeveloped parsnips on steroids. It is the kind of crop one must plant judiciously because once it gets established, I’ve heard gardeners say, it spreads and takes over other plants. The same is true in recipes – a little goes a long way: too much causes you to gasp for breath but just the right amount tickles your tastebuds.
Horseradish turns ketchup into cocktail sauce and makes mustard zestier (1 part Dijon mustard to 1 part horseradish). It improves stewed or boiled meats, even making pot roast tolerable (for those of us who find it punishment). Horseradish is the body and soul of a Bloody or Virgin Mary, and using homemade gives your drink more intensity. If you want to give an immediately useful gift when you are a brunch guest, bring a jar of homemade horseradish with a good bottle of tomato juice and, if your hosts imbibe, your favorite vodka.
Store bought horseradish is useful as backup but it is anemic when compared to freshly homemade. Horseradish isn’t the first thing you might consider preparing at home but is surprisingly easy to make in this era of muscular blenders and food processors. The only challenge is paying attention to when the roots are available, since this is a small window. Be forewarned – don’t take a big sniff when you take off the lid after grinding: This will be some powerful sh%#!! My eyes tear up just getting it out of the blender into a jar, so please beware!
HORSERADISH SAUCE
Wash and peel one large horseradish root. Cut in 1″ chunks and put in your food processor. Grind the cut up root by pulsing until it is the desired texture and then add 1 cup of white distilled vinegar and a teaspoon of coarse salt. (If you like a touch of sweetness, add 1 teaspoon of sugar per root. If you want your horseradish pink, add a small cut-up beet). Pulse a few more times until the horseradish reaches the desired consistency. When using a Vitamix or similar blender, add the vinegar before grinding. If the machine stalls, turn it off, stir and add a little more vinegar. In either case, is better too wet than too dry, as the finished horseradish will continue to absorb liquid as it sits in the refrigerator. Please BE CAREFUL when you remove the lid – there will be strong fumes! Spoon into clean jars and refrigerate. Horseradish keeps well in the refrigerator for months but will lose potency over time.
What to Make for Dinner is Whatever is Seasonal
We can create beautiful plates of food when cooking but it is more important that the dishes be tasty and nutritious. When they also look good, that is a side benefit. Any plate you present will be attractive if you use enough fresh, seasonal vegetables and don’t overcook them. Our family meals now incorporate many more vegetables than anything else. Sometimes we eat vegetarian, sometimes vegan, sometimes omnivorous. As diet and nutrition fads come and go, I try to stay focused on vegetables as the largest portion on our plates, supplemented by smaller amounts of fats, proteins and whole grains.
Using what is in season is an easy way to plan what to make for dinner. If you take a minute to think about what is fresh locally, the options become clearer and more limited. It is spring now so what is fresh in the market is asparagus, fiddlehead ferns, artichokes(from California), green garlic and ramps, soon to be followed by sugar snap and shell peas, radishes and spring onions.
With these seasonal vegetables in mind, you can start to think about making a simple pasta, risotto, quiche or frittata with any of these. When you add a side salad, you have an easy spring supper. With or without a grain or potato, roasted asparagus, sautéed sugar snaps or radishes or steamed fiddleheads, asparagus, artichokes or peas accompanying a piece of baked or broiled fish, chicken, tempeh or tofu constitute a satisfying simple meal. If you aren’t serving a starch, just enhance your plate with a second vegetable or salad.
It really is that easy.
ASPARAGUS TWO WAYS:
ROASTED ASPARAGUS
- 1 bunch fresh green asparagus, trimmed and cleaned
- 1 TBs olive oil
- 1 tsp sesame seeds (optional)
- 1 big pinch each of salt and black pepper
Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
Spread cleaned asparagus in a single layer on a rimmed cookie sheet or roasting pan (I like to use a piece of parchment paper to make clean-up easy)
Sprinkle with oil and roll asparagus around to coat
Sprinkle with sesame seeds and salt and pepper
Bake 9-12 minutes, depending on the thickness of the asparagus. I usually try them for doneness at 10 minutes.
SAUTEED ASPARAGUS AND GREEN GARLIC
- 1 bunch fresh green asparagus, trimmed and cleaned and cut in bite-sized pieces
- 1 bunch green garlic, cleaned like scallions and sliced thinly
chopped green garlic - 1 TBs olive oil
- 1 pinch salt
- zest from a small lemon (a microplane grater is the best tool for zesting)
Heat a wide skillet on medium high heat.
Add oil and, when hot, add green garlic and salt and sauté one minute.
Add asparagus pieces and sauté, stirring, over medium heat about 4 minutes, depending on the thickness of the asparagus, and add a splash of water if it all starts to stick.
As soon as you can pierce a piece of asparagus easily with a fork, take off heat and put in a serving dish.
Sprinkle with lemon zest.
Note – If you don’t have green garlic, simply use 2-3 cloves of the ordinary stuff, minced.
Dressing Spring Vegetables
When artichokes and asparagus are as beautiful and fresh as they are right now, I want to make them often. A steamed artichoke is a treat with melted butter but is elevated to another state with a scrumptious dip. Hollandaise sauce, a traditional accompaniment to both artichokes and asparagus, has alway been too rich for me. Plus, unless I’ve met the chicken whose eggs I’m eating, anything with raw egg in it makes me feel squeamish.
Growing up, we dipped our artichoke leaves in a homemade mustardy vinaigrette with chopped, hard boiled eggs. My mother clipped 
the recipe from a monthly newsletter more than 40 years ago and still pulls it out out every spring to sauce artichokes. When I went to copy down the recipe decades ago, it was already worn and speckled with drops of oil and now my own copy looks much the same. The vinaigrette in the newsletter came from Paul Steindler, a Czech chef who ran La Popette restaurant in New York.
For years I made Mom’s recipe just as she had prepared it, but then it occurred to me that a few changes might suit me better. I swapped in apple cider vinegar for white distilled, replaced the white sugar with maple syrup and went back to the Dijon mustard that was in the original (not the bright yellow “French’s” hot dog mustard we used at home). The newsletter recipe called for half a cup of olive oil but that made the vinaigrette too rich for my taste and tolerance. I cut the oil to 2 tablespoons and instead of adding a chopped egg at the end, I added 2 hard boiled eggs and blended them completely to thicken it all into an unctuous and tangy dip, similar to but lighter than the original.
We still celebrate spring with artichokes and asparagus dipped in this delicious mustardy vinaigrette and I feel good about making it. This combination of a vegetable with a protein makes it a meal, especially if you don’t want a heavy supper. If there is any sauce left over, it makes a pretty good dip for carrots or cold, cooked asparagus the next afternoon. You can prepare this vinaigrette ahead, as it will keep in the refrigerator a day or so, and just re-blend it while the artichokes or asparagus are steaming.
UN-HOLLANDAISE SAUCE
Blend well:
- 3 Tbs freshly squeezed lemon juice
- 1 Tbs apple cider vinegar
- 2 Tbs Dijon mustard
- 2 tsps maple syrup (or honey)
- 1/4 tsp Worcester sauce
- 2 Tbs olive oil
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/4 tsp black pepper
Add and blend until smooth:
- 2 hard boiled eggs, peeled
Great as a dip for artichokes (pour right into the center of a cooked and cleaned artichoke) or drizzled over steamed asparagus (or served in a small dish on the side). Store any leftover in the refrigerator for one day. Fills 4 large artichokes.
Silvia Granatelli – Animating and enriching our food with her pottery
photo by Molly Selznick
Color is the often the first thing that attracts me to Silvie Granatelli’s porcelain pottery – shiny, vivid turquoise or olive green interiors contrasting with satiny charcoal or deep mossy green exteriors. If it isn’t the color, it is the texture – repeating imprinted or raised linear patterning on the surface – that moves your eye and hands around the pots. This tableware beckons to be held. Sometimes the pots are pierced, sometimes stamped or appliquéd – decorated either by taking away or adding clay. Granatelli’s forms, whether straight-sided or undulating, are articulated and accentuated by both these surface markings and by her glazing choices.
photo by Molly Selznick
The functional results of her texture and color treatments are pots which are appealing to pick up and use and in which food looks great. Her dinner plates frame whatever is put on them just as her bowls work as a backdrop to flatter everything from plain old cereal to nuts. Granatelli is clear about her intentions. “My pottery is about food presentation. It is made to bring foods to light.” She pays attention to the details that make a pot more comfortable to use – the thickness of a mug’s lip, the position of a handle for ease of lifting, the width of a bowl’s foot to make it sit solidly on a flat surface. Her pieces are not just attractive but also they are well-crafted.
Granatelli thinks about these functional and physical details and about how her work fits into the larger theater of food presentation. “Currently, I am interested in hospitality. Hospitality, which means to give and to receive. I view pottery as a vehicle of hospitality, because a pot gives and receives simultaneously; it is both host and guest.”
When plating food in my own kitchen, her small pots are some of the pieces I reach for most often. Some of my favorites are carved and stamped bowls lined with a shiny lime green glaze. Sweet potato chips, sesame sticks and even a dollop of hummus look alive in these pots. Other faves are a set of linearly carved bowls with dreamy turquoise interiors that I use for everything from olives to salsa. A side perk of the animated, textured exteriors is that they don’t slip out of my hands so easily.
Granatelli lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains, near Floyd, Virginia. For many years she came north to sell her work at the annual Old Church holiday pottery sale (www.tasoc.org/node/871), one of the best places near New York City to buy pots. Now her pieces are for sale during semi-annual self-guided tours of studios in her area of Virginia (the next one is coming up April 30th and May 1st – http://www.16hands.com), year-round at Troika Contemporary Crafts, a local Floyd gallery (http://troikacrafts.com) or by contacting her directly at her website (http://silviegranatelli.com).
To see Silvie Granatelli at work, check out this short video:
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