Horseradish misery

I tried - and failed - to spend a worthwhile hour or two in the pub last night, but even the fact that it was Friday didn't help in any way. As during the lockdown, my Fridays are meaningless until I begin a new job which I don't want, only need.

I have to get settled in to Winter mode now. The wonderful Indian Summer has been replaced by endless grey days of extremely wet rain which is forecast to fall right the way through this weekend and the next. My plan for this one is to make a large stew and a large fresh fruit tart, meaning no cooking on Sunday. Also as lockdown, food has risen to the top of my agenda. I can see why lonely or troubled people can get fat.

I think I will make the first dumplings of the season. Up until a few years ago, 'Epicure' bottled an extremely simple condiment of grated fresh horseradish, which was wonderful to mix in the dumplings. I discovered that if you rub quite a lot of it into the mix, the heat of the horseradish is not lost as it is with other forms of cooking. 'Creamed' or other prepared horseradish does not work - the heat dissipates with cooking and all you are left with is the earthy undertone that horseradish has, like a lot of other tubers. Now I can't buy fresh grated horseradish and it pisses me off.

Last year, Waitrose sold whole fresh horseradish roots, wrapped in plastic. I began to get excited, even though the prospect of skinning and grating a whole horseradish was not something I looked forward to.

I picked one up and looked at the label on the heat-shrunk wrapping. It was imported from Poland.

Horseradish grows in the most inhospitable patches of land - motorway verges, scrap yards, bomb-sites, etc. - and it grows all over England, signalling its presence with huge, green, red-edged leaves. The root goes very deep into the land - up to three feet - so not many people want to go out on a day like today to spend an hour or so digging it up, especially when they know that they will have to spend another hour at home scraping their fingers and weeping from the powerful fumes. But WHY do we have to import it from Poland?! Is it the old story about the Poles being prepared to do the jobs which us Brits can't or won't?

Anyway, I took it home and grated it - or some of it - then mixed the gratings with the suet and chucked the dumplings in the stew.

They were tasteless.