Our family continues to be rich beyond all imaging in vegetables. There are CSA-accumulated veggies from last year in our freezer. There are husband-friendly veggies from the grocery store in the freezer. There are dehydrated summer squash by the quart jar in our basement pantry. There are new CSA vegetables rolling into our kitchen like weekly clockwork. We have *so* many vegetables, it's almost like they're even coming out of the dirt in our back yard! (Wait, they ARE actually coming out of the dirt in our backyard, too. Fancy that!)
My next-door neighbor is traveling for two weeks, so we've inherited her CSA share these past two weeks, which adds to the incredible vegetable wealth we find ourselves in right now. This explains how I found myself with two giant stalks of celery last week, in addition to the mounds of summer squash, lettuce, golden beets, broccoli, onions, and what-all-else-that-wandered-in. Don't forget this list, because it's going to come up again. And then hang tight, because I'm going to explain how this celery led me to make a welcome discovery about turnips! Whoop!
People keeps saying, and I mostly agree, that attitude is everything. I like to think of extra vegetables as a puzzle and a challenge: vegetables from the freezer section of the grocery store are like the Monday NY Times crossword puzzle; our regular CSA delivery is more like the Wednesday or Thursday version. (And that matches our household: my husband does the M-T-W puzzles, but I get the Th-F-S-S puzzles to play with). Getting double CSA delivery is like upgrading to the Saturday puzzle. What a fantastic challenge!
In the past, I've delegated celery-consumption to my husband, who claims to love celery. But he loves it in small quantities, and he also is sensitive to the celery losing its crunch after an extended refrigerator stay. Two celery heads would be more than he could handle, even if he hadn't been biking to Boston (which he was). So delegation wouldn't work.
Instead, I decided to whack at the celery (figuratively speaking) with my new kitchen tool. I googled, "cream of celery soup instant pot", and almost immediately had a bunch of great recipes to choose from. Awesome!
But the next challenge loomed: apparently, Cream of Celery soup requires potatoes, too. And in the wealth of vegetables that are overflowing the drawers and counters of my home, potatoes were conspicuously absent. But the over-abundance of vegetables also explained why I didn't want to add to the pile by going out and buying potatoes, either: I didn't want to bring home new vegetables just so that I could make soup with existing vegetables. What to do?
So I improvised. I went back to the vegetables I already had, and I interrogated them. I looked carefully at " . . . the mounds of summer squash, lettuce, golden beets, broccoli, onions, and what-all-else-that-wandered-in . . . " And I told the golden beets, "guys, you're going to get to fill in as understudies for the potatoes tonight!". And you know what, it turns out that in Cream of Celery soup, beets make great potatoes! (Also, fyi, yogurt can slip right in to play the role of heavy cream).
N-son loved the soup, and had seconds. So when Sabbath rolled around and I was gearing up to make my sabbath soup, we improvised once more. Cream of broccoli! The beets were all gone by now, but I rummaged around in the freezer, and I found diced turnips that I'd set aside from last year. Well, those turnips weren't getting any younger, so out of the freezer they came. I tossed them in the pot with broccoli and a bit of onion and butter, some water, and zam! Lunch for a week!
So that's what celery taught me. That turnips can masquerade as potatoes. And now you know that, too.
My next-door neighbor is traveling for two weeks, so we've inherited her CSA share these past two weeks, which adds to the incredible vegetable wealth we find ourselves in right now. This explains how I found myself with two giant stalks of celery last week, in addition to the mounds of summer squash, lettuce, golden beets, broccoli, onions, and what-all-else-that-wandered-in. Don't forget this list, because it's going to come up again. And then hang tight, because I'm going to explain how this celery led me to make a welcome discovery about turnips! Whoop!
People keeps saying, and I mostly agree, that attitude is everything. I like to think of extra vegetables as a puzzle and a challenge: vegetables from the freezer section of the grocery store are like the Monday NY Times crossword puzzle; our regular CSA delivery is more like the Wednesday or Thursday version. (And that matches our household: my husband does the M-T-W puzzles, but I get the Th-F-S-S puzzles to play with). Getting double CSA delivery is like upgrading to the Saturday puzzle. What a fantastic challenge!
In the past, I've delegated celery-consumption to my husband, who claims to love celery. But he loves it in small quantities, and he also is sensitive to the celery losing its crunch after an extended refrigerator stay. Two celery heads would be more than he could handle, even if he hadn't been biking to Boston (which he was). So delegation wouldn't work.
Instead, I decided to whack at the celery (figuratively speaking) with my new kitchen tool. I googled, "cream of celery soup instant pot", and almost immediately had a bunch of great recipes to choose from. Awesome!
But the next challenge loomed: apparently, Cream of Celery soup requires potatoes, too. And in the wealth of vegetables that are overflowing the drawers and counters of my home, potatoes were conspicuously absent. But the over-abundance of vegetables also explained why I didn't want to add to the pile by going out and buying potatoes, either: I didn't want to bring home new vegetables just so that I could make soup with existing vegetables. What to do?
So I improvised. I went back to the vegetables I already had, and I interrogated them. I looked carefully at " . . . the mounds of summer squash, lettuce, golden beets, broccoli, onions, and what-all-else-that-wandered-in . . . " And I told the golden beets, "guys, you're going to get to fill in as understudies for the potatoes tonight!". And you know what, it turns out that in Cream of Celery soup, beets make great potatoes! (Also, fyi, yogurt can slip right in to play the role of heavy cream).
N-son loved the soup, and had seconds. So when Sabbath rolled around and I was gearing up to make my sabbath soup, we improvised once more. Cream of broccoli! The beets were all gone by now, but I rummaged around in the freezer, and I found diced turnips that I'd set aside from last year. Well, those turnips weren't getting any younger, so out of the freezer they came. I tossed them in the pot with broccoli and a bit of onion and butter, some water, and zam! Lunch for a week!
So that's what celery taught me. That turnips can masquerade as potatoes. And now you know that, too.
Just to be 100% clear: Turnips cannot masquerade as potatoes for every palate. Pureed cooked turnips can ruin an entire meal for someone who hates cooked turnips (but loves potatoes). Not even broccoli can hide the strength of their awfulness. (Turns out raw turnips aren't as terrible as cooked.) I speak from wretched experience of someone trying to faithfully use a turnip-heavy CSA.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing you can do to substitute for potatoes is to use less water and make a flour roux instead of relying on cooked potatoes as a thickening agent.
Duly noted!
Delete