Tag Archives: celery

A Winter Salad with Celery and Parmesan

11 Replies

There are a lot of things I like about seasonal produce.   A summer peach, a fall persimmon, a winter tangerine, the first stalk of rhubarb: each is most perfect in its own moment.

But then there are times when I stick my fingers in my ears: “la la la la la, I’m not listening!”  Like when it becomes painfully apparent that lettuce is no longer in season.  Some things I just can’t survive the winter without.This is a green salad to brighten your winter, full of lemony zing, celery crunch, and the wide-awake flavor of flat-leaf parsley.  Continue reading →

Advertisement

Creamy Roasted Celery Soup and Vegan Cookbook Giveaway

69 Replies

Welcome to Emmy Cooks!  You can see more of my favorite recent recipes by clicking the “My Favorite Recipes” category on the sidebar (here are July, August, and September).  If you like what you see here, you can sign up on the sidebar to receive a daily recipe by email, add the RSS feed to your blog reader, or follow Emmy Cooks on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

Here for the Vegan Cookbook Giveaway?  Head on down the bottom of this post.Hello, friends!  Welcome to my table.  I’m happy to be joining the Virtual Vegan Potluck for the second time today, and I hope you’ll join me in visiting many of the other participating blogs!  (If you’re making your way around the circle, click here to go forward to the tasty blog Cheerfully Vegan, or click here to go back to Cauldrons and Cupcakes, where I love living vicariously on Nicole’s Australian farm with the koalas, platypus, and wallabies–and there’s even a calf named after me!)

I’m serving soup today, and before you turn your nose up at a creamy celery soup, let me just talk to you about the roasted part of this roasted celery soup.  It’s transformative.  It’s sublime.  It makes me revel in all the things that one humble vegetable can be.  Celery is crisp and herbal when freshly sliced.  It’s aromatic and powerful when dried.  And when roasted, as it is here, celery becomes sweet and deeply flavorful, bringing an earthy umami element to this creamy soup.  Aren’t vegetables amazing? Continue reading →

Minestrone, or, My Biggest Pot of Soup

14 Replies

This is a soup with a story.  It’s essentially a minestrone, so you might think that our tale is going to start in Italy, with a grandmother tending a simmering pot for hours—and you’d be partly right.  Except that this story is about my good friend’s great-grandparents, and the pot was simmering on a stove in a bar in Sacramento, California.

Now, Sacramento has a long history as a drinking town.  So from the first days of the California Gold Rush, to the speakeasies of prohibition, to—I can only imagine—the indulgences of today’s state government bigwigs, there has been a steady stream of drinking establishment clients in need of a little something to help them sober up.

Our story, this soup’s story, takes place in the respectable post-prohibition era.  So it’s the 1930’s, maybe, and later the 1940’s.  The bar is remembered in family lore only as “The Joint,” which may or may not have been its name.  It resided within what was, at the time, the oldest standing building in Sacramento.  A watering trough waited outside the door for customers arriving by horse and buggy.  And my friend’s great-grandparents, the proprietors, always kept a pot of this minestrone soup behind the bar.  The recipe, needless to say, has been passed down through the generations. Continue reading →

Green Olive and Celery Salad

9 Replies

Welcome to Emmy Cooks!  You can see more of my favorite recent recipes by clicking the “My Favorite Recipes” category on the sidebar (here are July, August, and September).  If you like what you see here, you can sign up on the sidebar to receive a daily recipe by email, add the RSS feed to your blog reader, or follow Emmy Cooks on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

Here’s a funny little thing, while we’re eating bits and bobs this week.  Not quite a salad, not quite a relish, full of flavor and crunch and brine and pop.

I found it via Lottie + Doof, where Tim says he found it in a Sicilian cookbook.  It’s kind of weird.  Whatever.  It’s great.We scooped spoonfuls onto the baguette rounds we ate alongside our shakshuka the other day.  I had a little pile of it beside my sandwich.  I daresay it could go right into a sandwich of the right sort quite happily.  Or serve it as part of an antipasto spread, of course.  Or just with a fork. Continue reading →

Crunchy Celery and Fennel Salad

27 Replies

We are welcoming some new friends to Emmy Cooks today!  They are fine folks, the discerning type who chose not only to click on a “Freshly Pressed” beet recipe, but also chose to stick around and click on over here, too.  So welcome, new friends!  Here you’ll find a community of cooks and readers and writers and old friends who are always ready to answer questions, share good advice, and trade recipes and tips.  Thank you, old friends and new friends, for being here!

In the spirit of the communal table, here’s a potluck contribution that travels well, so you can take it to parties all summer.  I was inspired to make it, I confess, when I accidentally found three heads of celery in my grocery bag instead of the one I meant to buy (don’t even ask how that happened), but the happy result was a salad so crisp and lemony that I will certainly be making it again.  It joined a host of other outstanding salads in our friends’ back yard this afternoon, where I also discovered the allure of thick slabs of roasted fennel.  Just make sure you save a fennel bulb for the salad.Remember that riotous fiesta of a Summer Crunch Salad with Feta, Mint, and Lime?  The one we had to make over and over because it was so good?  This salad is a refined Italian relation: fennel, Parmesan cheese, lemon.  You could go the distance by substituting pine nuts for the pumpkin seeds.  Either way, the key elements here are the same: celery and fennel for crunch, plenty of Parmesan shavings for salt, and enough lemon juice to make the whole thing sing. Continue reading Crunchy Celery and Fennel Salad (click for recipe)