So Much Celery

So you open your box, and you pull out all this great produce. You’re excited about the possibilities for each thing: apples, pears, limes, potatoes, zucchini, some unknown round thing that turns out to be kohlrabi, ... And then, under the layer of brown paper, there is, almost every week, a HUGE bunch of celery. The kind you buy in preparation for Thanksgiving stuffing. The size you are looking for if you are planning to make chicken salad for your 25 person office party. But definitely NOT the size you think you can use in a week.

How do we eat all this celery before the next bunch comes? Great question. I only solved this issue when I realized I needed to change my approach. My thinking before: What dish can I make that has lots of celery in it? [silence … there are none.] My new thinking: how do I sneak some celery into several meals that may not call for celery? It turns out, you can add celery to lots of dishes and no one will notice:

-sauteed veggies: easily takes 2-3 stalks of celery, and no one notices it amidst the other veggies in there.

-soup: any soup from scratch should start with a mirepoix (pronounced “meerpwah,” fancy French term for carrots, celery, and onions, all cut up). You can easily use another 2-3 stalks here.

-speaking of mirepoix , use it to get some veggies into spaghetti sauce without compromising tomato/meat flavor. The traditional Italian Bolognese sauce includes mirepoix and meat(s), with relatively little tomato. We eat it on top of almost anything—pasta, for sure, but also sautéed veggies, sweet potatoes, potatoes, fried plantains … My husband eats it straight as a snack or lunch.

-stock: you can always throw some celery stalks in your stock pot with those chicken or beef scraps (not both!!). I like to use the leaves, here, too. They usually taste too strong to use anywhere else, and yet here they work great. So if I have a lot of good-looking leafy tops, I rinse them off and into the stock pot they go!

The head of celery will be gone before you know it. A stalk or two a day keeps the celery monster away!

#celery #byingredient #veggies #vegetables #openthebox