Hot horseradish.

A few years ago we were given 3 baby horseradish plants and after reading about them and finding out that they were very invasive,  we gave them a nice big space all to themselves with lots of room to spread out.  They grew into lovely big plants but I seem to remember reading that they needed at least one winter to develop big enough roots for harvesting.

So they got their first winter and second summer,  then one night last year when it got colder than expected and they weren't protected in any way,  the leaves all died off.  I didn't want to risk digging them up for the roots in case that finally killed them off so we kept our fingers crossed till this Spring, when up came new leaves.  Only though on 2 of the plants, the other seemed to have disappeared completely.

They are now  as big as they were before the cold got to them and  today I went with the garden fork  to lift the biggest one for some fresh horseradish.  The most enormous root ball eventually came up with loads of roots, one snapped off at ground level so I cut it off from the main plant as well,  and cut off another just in case.  I expect the snapped one will now turn into another plant.

Wash, peel and grate says my book, preferably in a food processor as the juices are very pungent.  That's what I did and wow!  was that right!   I thought wasabi had a kick to it which made my eyes water but this did just the same.  I added some white wine vinegar and a little bit of sugar and put it in a jar in the fridge.  Tomorrow we'll add some single cream and have it with our roast beef and yorkshire puds.  We don't often buy a  big piece of beef as we usually have enough jabalí to roast but we cooked the last of it recently.   Hopefully Antonio will be out hunting before too long and restock us!