Shiny Cooking

That funny looking thing that looked like a cross between a post-nuclear-holocaust carrot and an anime tentacle monster?

Horseradish. It grows in the front of my yard near the ditch, and in Mom and Dad’s in a little “patch” near the field. All I know is it grows on its own and it’s nearly impossible to kill.

Every year before Christmas, Dad digs up the horseradish roots and makes the condiment we call horseradish. Not to be confused with the plant itself. Except for the whole sharing-a-name thing.

It starts out like this, a pile of gnarled, muddy roots.

Dad puts them on the low screened table I use to cure onions.

Then, hook up the power washer! Read more on how to make horseradish, plus a horseradish giveaway…

My dad prepared this mystery food just before Christmas. Some of it wound up as gifts.

Tomorrow I’ll be offering up one of those gifts to you, dear reader, in the first ever Shiny Cooking Giveaway Extravaganza™.

Read more on guess the mystery food…

Read more on daring bakers: nanaimo bars…

We love seaweed, how about you?

People were confused when I told them my aunt Linda and I would be making sushi for January’s 24, 24, 24 event. “Isn’t that raw fish?” they asked, knowing I’m not a huge fan of animal foods. Technically, sushi is rice that’s been specially prepared with vinegar and a little sugar, and topped with or rolled with…something.

It could be a shaped piece of rice with a slice of lightly steamed bias-cut carrot on top, tied with a scallion. This is nigiri sushi.

It could be a fat roll of rice bound in nori (seaweed) and filled with imitation crab strips, tamago (japanese omelet), scallion, and cucumber. This is futo maki.

It could be an inside out roll, with the rice outside the seaweed, all enveloping imitation crab, avocado, and pickled beets. This is uramaki. But everyone calls it inside out roll.

It could even be dessert.

Other forms of sushi include battleship roll (gunkan), which we didn’t make, temaki, which we didn’t make, and hosomaki, or thin rolls, which we did make, but I didn’t get any closeups of. Thin rolls use half a sheet of nori and are filled with only one or two ingredients besides the sushi rice.

what’s in this post, and what isn’t

Read more on We love seaweed, yes we do…

How about a nice bowl of cheery orange-colored soup to warm your tummy on a cold winter night? I only recently began to appreciate soup, having been too lazy to properly appreciate it in the past — soup isn’t often stick-to-your-ribs fare and I’m pretty side-dish impaired, as far as getting out bread or making a salad to go with the soup. Read more on winter soup of carrots, lentils, apple, and sweet potato…