Solving the celery problem

Every time I see statistics about food waste, my mind completely boggles. I read a news story claiming that the average family of four in the U.S. throws away $1,500 worth of uneaten food each year, and I just don't understand how it's possible. Are these people deliberately buying food they don't intend to eat? Are they discarding all their leftovers after every meal without even thinking about whether they can be useful? (In some cases, apparently, yes.) Are they making no effort at all to use the food in the fridge before it rots?

I will admit, however, that there's one particular ingredient we have often had trouble disposing of before it goes bad: celery. The problem with celery is that while there are lots of recipes that use it, there are almost no recipes that use much of it. When we buy, say, a cabbage, we usually plan to use it in a specific recipe, such as Indian cabbage or Rumbledethumps. If there's enough left over, we make a second dish with it, and if there's still a bit left we toss it in a stir-fry. All gone.

But celery is a different matter. We have lots of different recipes that use it — Pasta Fagioli, mushroom soup, sometimes tuna casserole — but as a rule, they only use a stalk or two at a time. So it's something we always like to have on hand, but not something we go through very fast. All of which means that we're often unable to use up an entire bunch of celery before the last few stalks turn limp and soggy, fit only for the stock bag, or worse, brown and squidgy, fit only for the compost bin. We've tried wrapping the celery snugly in aluminum foil, which is supposed to make it last longer, but according to WikiHow, even this can only extend its lifetime to about three or four weeks — not usually enough for us to go through a whole bunch.

A week or so ago, as we found ourselves once again discarding the sodden remnants of a once-crisp head of celery, I got frustrated and started searching the Internet for better ways to preserve it. And I hit on this article from Eating Well about a solution so obvious I wanted to give myself a dope slap for not thinking of it sooner: just freeze it.

Since most of the celery we use is cooked rather than raw, there's no reason why it needs to be fresh. Both its flavor and its texture are just as good if it's been frozen — particularly if you blanch it first, as the article suggests, by cooking it in boiling water for about three minutes and then quickly dunking it in ice water to stop the cooking process. 

So, with the last bunch of celery we brought home from the store, we did just this. We washed and chopped the entire batch, blanched it, spread it out on a cookie tray to freeze, and then transferred it to a freezer bag. Last night Brian used some of the frozen celery in a batch of mushroom barley soup, and it was pretty much indistinguishable from the same soup made with fresh celery. And it was actually more convenient to use, since it had all been chopped up ahead of time. It could just go straight into the pot  from the freezer.

There's only one problem with this celery preservation method: once in a while, we actually do like a bit of fresh celery in a salad or a tuna sandwich. Fresh is a bit better for stir-frying, too, since it retains more crunch. We could buy a batch of fresh celery when we need some for one of these purposes, but then we'd be back to where we were before: using up only a few stalks of celery and needing to preserve the rest. Of course, we could just use two stalks and freeze the rest, but if we did this every time we needed fresh celery, our freezer would soon be overflowing with the frozen stuff.

Fortunately, I had recently heard of another trick that could address this problem as well. Over the summer, I joined an online gardening discussion group called Everybody's Farm, and in one of our meetings, someone mentioned the technique of regrowing a head of celery from the cut-off base. We'd been doing this for years with scallions, another veggie that we often use only one or two at a time, but I had no idea it worked with celery too.

So, when we cut up our current head of celery for blanching and freezing, we made a point of leaving a couple of inches at the bottom, as instructed in this article from The Spruce. Since it was our first time trying this, we opted for the simpler method of just submerging the bottom of this cut-off celery base in a dish of water and putting it in our sunny southeast-facing window. (The article recommended "a bright area but out of direct sunlight," but since we didn't have any spots that fit both criteria, we figured the first was more important. The sunlight isn't all that direct.) And sure enough, within a few days, tiny leaves had started to poke out from the chopped-off stalks. After about a week, it's developed a regular little tuft of leaves like a green Mohawk.

Now that we know this is working, we'll probably transfer the celery end to a permanent home in a pot, which The Spruce says will encourage it to grow bigger. The article warns that we'll probably still get "more leaves than stalks" this way, but the leaves are good fodder for the stock bag, and the new celery plant will be able to keep our potted scallions company.

In fact, after this success, we've actually been toying with the idea of growing some microgreens in that corner as well, as outlined in this New York Times article. We've already got some takeout containers that would work for seed starting, some arugula seed left over from this year's garden, and the light from our seed-starting setup, so all we would need is a bag of potting soil. And if that actually works — and if we decide to keep up the practice as more than a one-off experiment — I think we should start referring to that sunny table in the southwest corner as our winter garden.