Friday, March 20, 2009

Roasted Celery

I have an affinity for buying the giant bundles of celery at IGA. They are considerably cheaper than the smaller big brand packages, and I fall for their cute local-ness every time.

That means that I often have a lot of celery in the fridge. I've been trying to think creatively about that celery, but today I really got to business. What I wanted was roasted broccoli, but what I had was celery.

I thought about just having some celery and hummus, but I hate hate hate the celery strings.


See? Unacceptable.

Instead of trying to figure out a dozen recipes that require a little bit of celery each, I decided to mainstage the celery and roast it. Why should broccoli have all the fun? I found a recipe at Astray Recipes, but it is one of those recipes that is posted just below an add for yellow teeth cures, so... I'll just tell you what to do and you can avoid that upsettingly toothy image.

Chop the celery to manageable pieces. If there are pieces that don't look enthused about the roasting, feel free to pitch them. There are plenty of stalks that would love to have a chance like this.


Toss the stalks with a little bit of olive oil and put them in a 375 oven for 30 minutes.


After one minute in the oven, realize you should add some garlic. Sprinkle chopped garlic in a really haphazard way and put it all back in. Like you mean it this time.

Watch the sun set while the celery roasts and lament the lack of sunlight available for remaining blog pics.

Towards the end of the 30 minutes, melt 2 tablespoons of butter and add 1 tablespoon of fresh thyme and enough breadcrumbs to look good. When the timer dings, remove celery, sprinkle with mixture and put those celeries back in for another 10 minutes.


When the timer dings again, shriek with delight. Remove dish from oven. Happily stand over it for a minute while clutching your hands together (one oven mitt still on). This step may seem superfluous, but you won't understand how good it is until you try it.

Plate.


(I awkwardly plated mine on top of some leftover meatballs and whole grain linguini.)

And enjoy.

Feel good about the fact that you are eating celery without concurrently (and accidentally) flossing.

3 comments:

Kate said...

No amount of panache will get me to eat celery. That's an enemy I just can't conquer. I admire you much more so for finding a way you can tolerate (and even enjoy) it.

Eva said...

this looks interesting.... i always seem to have celery in the fridge. Most of the time it looks pretty questionable. I don't eat raw celery and most recipes only use 1 rib so this might be an interesting use for the rest of the bunch.

Pamela said...

I'm not convinced roasting celery is a good idea but I might try it based on your recommendation.

But what I really wanted to comment on was yeah, wtf with those yellow teeth ads? There's one where the teeth are too long, scary and big bad wolf-like. When I see that ad I don't want to whiten my teeth. I want to go to a dark room and rest with a cool washcloth on my forehead.