I have so much beautiful celery plus easy ratatouille
CSA zero... sort of
I got this really beautiful celery from my CSA. Two heads of the most slender and beautiful celery you have ever seen. Unfortunately, as I have opined to Noah many (many) times, they really should sell celery by the individual stalk, because there is basically no recipe that uses a whole bunch of celery. Here are some recipes I have located in an attempt to use as much celery as I possibly can.
A celery and green pepper stir fry from, would you believe it, the woks of life.
A recipe from Hetty McKinnon in NYT cooking for celery stir fried with corn and pine nuts. Corn and pine nuts is a great combination that I was never fortunate enough to have until last year at thanksgiving. My friends who were in town without plans and I all got dumplings from the stores near us, and just steamed tons of dumplings. One of them was corn and pine nut. A truly wonderful combination. Anyway, I made this but I, like a fool, did not taste the pine nuts before I used them, and they were stale. Stale nuts really ruin a dish completely. This was mid, at best. Not sure that the celery would have added anything to this dish anyway. Corn and pine nuts are perfect on their own, perhaps with the addition of some peas, idk what the celery would do for them.
Some great advice from a friend on ig was just to freeze individual celery stalks and use them for stock. I thought this was genius, and it had never occurred to me. My freezer is a bit of a nightmare (I think I have too many dumplings….) but I will make room for the rest of the celery, frozen.
Here are some other things I’m doing with my CSA veg:
Lazy ratatouille, from Alexandra Cooks. Ratatouille was probably the first food I ever cooked. Not like, in terms of like “making food” but in terms of “cooking” food (one thing I’ve learned in Korean is that usually when you talk about home cooking you’d say “I made food” you wouldn’t often use the verb “to cook” to describe it. I don’t agree entirely with the distinction, but it is helpful in some ways. I had a Korean therapist once who was really into blood types, but we also had a long conversation about what “cooking” was versus “making food.” He wasn’t a great therapist. I later learned that this was because of the way the language differentiates between them, if you do it at home, more or less, it is “making” but if you’re a chef it’s “cooking.” I think it sort of makes sense to say that like, frying an egg or whatever is “making food” but making a fancy dish is cooking, but anyway…) I’d made a lot of food before, but I hadn’t done much in the way of cooking.
The first ratatouille recipe that I made I recall being incredibly complicated and time consuming, I would have sworn it was from Serious Eats, but I cannot find it on their website anymore. I made it a few summers in high school, I think. I have a large quantity of english eggplants, and also one big zucchini and some green bell peppers, so I think I’m going to make this, and just use (sue me) a can of pureed tomatoes. The recipe I remember had a puree of tomatoes and bell pepper. This will probably also be good? I’ll put it on the mini raviolis I bought from Caputo’s a few weeks back.
To make this one take: whatever stuff you have from your CSA that is ratatoille-able. In my case: one green bell pepper, one purple bell pepper, one onion, a half head of garlic, one enormous eggplant, one enourmous zucchini, and a 28 oz can of whole peeled tomatoes. I diced everything pretty small (about a quarter to half inch cube) and finely sliced the bell peppers. I tore the tomatoes apart with my hands because I thought that would be less messy than slicing them (it wasn’t), I poured the tomato puree over the top. Then I added a fair amount of salt, less than a tablespoon, more than a teaspoon, all the pepper that was left in the pepper mill, a nice quantity of olive oil, and a good bit of balsamic vinegar. Sorry I didn’t measure a thing. I cooked it at 400 for 45 minutes, tasted the sauce, and thought it was bland, so then I added some MSG. Then cooked for two more hours. I had this as pasta sauce on some mini raviolis, which used about half of it, I froze the rest. It was really good!
Zucchini corn stir fry from Just One Cookbook. A Japanese take on the classic summer ingredients. Miso and butter taste great together, and maybe you want a slightly different way of combining zucchini and corn.
I haven’t actually made this yet this summer, and who knows, perhaps I won’t, I’ve been feeling kind of off cooking lately, but I have made this galette probably once or twice a summer, christ, since the recipe was published in 2013? I remember making it the summer I lived up on 52nd street in Portland in 2013, where, because I had been too clinically depressed to find a real job, I was trying to grow seeds and buy as much stuff with my snap benefits as possible, so that I seemed like a worthwhile roommate. I only successfully grew zucchini though. Oops. Anyway, it’s kinda fussy, it’s a fair bit of work, and after you eat it you’re still kind of hungry because it is just like, mostly carbs, but it’s also really delicious. Like, I do actually really love this recipe. Maybe if I get baby tomatoes next week I’ll make it.
I also keep getting lettuce, but guess what: I ate all my lettuce this week, after not one, not two, but THREE weeks of just giving my lettuce to a friend because I couldn’t face it. Hey, that’s not creating food waste, it’s sharing. I’m a good person, actually.