Ukrainian Village and Horseradish!

After 4 years of living in Edmonton, I *finally* made it out to visit the Ukrainian Village on Saturday for the Fall Harvest festival.  The weather had turned, and wasn't like the forecast when I went to bed Friday night. It was darn chilly, and we didn't bring appropriate clothing. (Note to self: get the bin back into the S.O.'s truck with the appropriate emergency gear!)

Other than discovering I had burst a blood vessel in my eye near my nose, and a little chilly, it was a very nice place to visit.  There were vendors there from the gentleman selling beautiful alpaca light, soft poncho-type shawls for $89 & lovely jackets for $119 (such gorgeous fibre), from clothes to old money (numismatic bills and coins!) and souvenirs and the society selling garden seeds, veggies and HORSERADISH.  I've been dying to make some that doesn't have grain vinegar in it, and for $2, I thought I'd give it a go.  Well, $2 got me a grocery store produce bag - you know, those clear ones that are about 8 1/2" X 12"… FULL of roots.  No I'm not kidding.  At the 104 Street Downtown farmer's market, one of the vendors was selling 2 small-ish roots for $4, so you can see my shock.

Tape for comparative size!

One big bag o'Horseradish!

We didn't have nearly enough time to visit the whole village, but we'll be back!  $30 for an annual family pass - we plan to return on our motorcycles as our getaway outing next summer.

On our way out, just before the rain started, I got a bowl of really "meaty" gluten free mushroom soup from Molly's Eats, and some sweet potato fries and salad rolls from the Vietnamese food truck.  Two thumbs up on the fries - coated in rice flour, but if you don't tolerate cross-contamination in the fryer, might not be a great idea for you.  Dragon sauce was pretty good. The salad rolls - well, the noodles had been prepped a while before assembly and needed warming up. You know the texture I'm talking about. Still, wasn't bad.  Since I can't eat most of the traditional fare offered by the village, I was pleased to have some choice - and GOOD choice.  My S.O. bought a grilled cheese sandwich, a jumbo cookie and some pie from Molly's Eats, that didn't last long.  The bowl of soup from Molly's is deceiving!! So filling - it was tough to finish, but I pushed through to the bottom.

So I'm on the hunt for the recipe my sister was telling me she found on Epicurious.  Good grief.  280 horseradish recipes.  Well, then you all know what happens next… Google. <sigh> Then… YouTube.

Although most recipes seem to refer to white vinegar (usually derived from grain) as their choice of acid, I did find some other websites that were mighty helpful, and did point out that lemon juice or ascorbic acid and even cider vinegar was also successful at maintaining the colour and stabilizing the heat and flavour.

Simply Recipes has a nice page with directions, and Food Skills for Self Sufficiency has a really informative page, (plus a repository of other interesting info).

My sister also mentioned that if you don't have jars - just freeze portions in plastic sandwich bags.  I have some pasta sauce jars, so I'll use those for now, but we'll check with my co-workers, and perhaps the FreeCycle folks to see if anyone is getting rid of any small baby food jars so I can freeze a lifetime supply!

 Since I ran out of daylight looking for recipies, I'm guessing this will go down outside, on my patio after What the Truck 2?! tomorrow night.