Oh man, who let me type that?  I’m going to dedicate this post to my brother, the King Of Puns, and a fellow horseradish lover.

Jefe and I ran to TJ Maxx last weekend to pick up a ceramic casserole dish and discovered the European Market just a couple of doors to the North (in the same strip mall on 48th).  The very, very nice woman working informed me that they’d been there a couple of months and offered to help interpret anything that I couldn’t read on the labels.  Luckily, most of it also has ingredients in English, and the photos were pretty self-explanatory as a rule.

I honestly got hung up in the aisle of jarred, pickled goods, so I’ll have to go back and explore some more before I can give a  full accounting of what they stock, but that aisle alone had a lot of goodness to offer, provided you like pickled-type things, which I adore.

I picked up a freshly baked loaf of rye (she said they bake daily), a jar of horseradish with beets, a bag of egg noodles (for the Hungarian Beef Stew that was on the menu for the next day), and a jar of pickled pattypan squash.  Oh heavens, do I love these squash – I promptly made a snack of the bread with some butter, slathered in the horseradish, and few of the squash, all room temp.  Delicious and tangy!

There were bottles of curried catsup, jars of eggplant spreads, loads of things with cabbage, squash, peppers, and mushrooms, toiletries, staples, frozen goods,…for such a small space there was a nice variety of items without being overwhelming.

And as a side bonus, the owner told me that she was from Astonia, which reminded me of Veronica – a lovely Astonian woman I worked with in Chicago, who knit me the most gorgeous yellow wool socks for my birthday one year.  I went home and put them right on my chilly toes and smiled.