View from the North 40: Price of home-ground magic

High on the list of life’s elixirs, those magical potions that bring a spark of, well, magic to food, to gatherings, to life itself, is horseradish. Yes, glorious, creamy, rip your sinuses right out of your head horseradish.

What’s a roast beef without it? Just a slab of slightly pinkish, brown meat of beast taking up space on my plate and underwhelming my palate.

When you have roast beast cooking away in the oven on a crisp fall-like day and nary a jar of horseradish to be found in fridge or cupboard, these desperate times call for desperate measures. And measures don’t get much more desperate than me heading out to the horseradish patch armed with a No. 2 spade and my No. 1 guy to dig up fresh roots to process.

I’ve had that horseradish patch for about 20 years, and I’ve never processed more than a little bit of it at a time and only on rare occasions, carefully digging only a small root that wouldn’t disturb the plants too much, making enough for only a meal or two, relying almost solely on the horseradish I harvest in the grocery store aisle for my culinary needs.

So, really, I don’t know what came over me last weekend when I attacked those roots like I was Paul Bunyan harvesting logs in a redwood forest, but it took two of us to haul the stash into the house, eyes alight with the vision of gallons of horseradish stretching into the future. Not once foreseeing the complete disaster that would become of my kitchen or myself. (A common theme with me and projects, but let's save that topic for another day and move on, shall we.)

The horseradish project started with the cleaning of the roots which I thought had been cleaned up considerably prior to hauling the inside, but dirt has its own ambitions to fertilize the world, including counter tops. Four buckets of water, one splattered window and five mud pies later, I was ready for the next step: scattering peelings over everything including the floor, a row of cookbooks and my once-clean dishes. Mission accomplished.

Out came the food processor, and I promptly bound up the blades. Three times. Then decided I really did have to slice the roots to get the blades to work properly. It only took two more rounds of bound-up blades to figure out how thin to make the slices. Then I still had to continually open the processor's lid to scrap the pulp off the sides.

I mention this whole food-processing process only because each time I lifted the sealed processor lid an invisible cloud of fumes burst forth, attacking my eyes and sinuses. What started as a few tears and a sniffle became uncontrollable tears pouring from my squinched-shut, burning eyes.

My husband brought me safety glasses that sealed around my eyes. A savior.

The sniffle became an open floodgate of runny nose and a pile of soggy tissues, until I finally mastered the art of mouth-breathing to save my sinuses. Then my lungs got seared and the coughing began. My trusty assistant handed over a fumes respirator.

Honestly, no kitchen is complete without a fumes respirator and skin-tight safety goggles.

Ultimately, I netted about one-and-a-half cups of pure horseradish, which might get me through until spring thaw.

But any plans for future horseradish harvests will include: a high-pressure washer set up outdoors, a hazardous materials suit and poison control on hold, ready to fly in a rescue team should I be overcome with horseradish fumes again.

Magic comes at a price — that holds true for elixirs as well, I guess.

(Nobody has actually died after eating food I have prepared, so there is that in my favor at [email protected].)