The Red Emma

Don’t you always wish that rock stars would come to your apartment and repair your kitchen equipment? Then you can surely imagine the delight I felt when Shoshke-Rayzl and her pal Teresa dropped by the other night and Teresa fixed my champion juicer. This made me very happy because this machine cost about two hundred dollars, and weighs about two hundred pounds and occupies about two hundred cubic feet of the space in my apartment, so I was really beginning to resent that it wasn’t making any juice.

To celebrate, I made the juice pictured above with cucumbers, beets (lots of beets), carrots, and purple cabbage. And, since we were celebrating and all, I added some of the horseradish-infused vodka I prepared last Peysekh. This turned out to be very nice, with the beet and horseradish combination tasting very evocative of khreyn mit burik, the beet and horseradish salad that frequently accompanies gefilte fish, called ćwikła in Polish.

The Red Emma

1 pound carrots

1 pound beets

½ pound cucumbers

¼ pound purple cabbage, or any cabbage

¼ pound celery

several sprigs parsley

horseradish-infused vodka, to taste

Put the vegetables and parsley through a juice extractor. Add horseradish-infused vodka. If you do not have any horseradish-infused vodka, put a tiny piece of horseradish, or a bit of prepared horseradish through the juicer as well. Serve chilled.

Khreyn-Infused Vodka

Scrub and peel a four-inch piece of fresh horseradish root. Pour two liters of kosher for Passover vodka into a glass bowl or ice bucket. Add the horseradish and allow to sit at room temperature for about twenty-four hours. Pour the vodka back into the bottles and chill. Oh baby.

Congratulations to Nandita of Saffron Trail for correctly guessing the subject of this photo.