The trouble with celery...

I do not grow celery in my garden. Somehow, I think I'm "afraid" of it, thinking it must be difficult and exotic. Well, whether it is or not, I always buy it instead. The problem has been that I'll buy a perfectly good stalk of celery, use part of it, put it back in the refrigerator and forget about it. The next time I see it, well, um... it's a little "gone by" as they say.

Yesterday I saw beautiful stalks of celery for 76 cents each. I bought 6 of them. I cut off the root end, carefully washed all of the celery and sliced it up quickly in my food processor:



Then I put 3 cups batches into Food Saver bags and vacuum sealed them:



I ended up with 18 packages of celery and froze them:



Now, when I need celery for chowder, soup or stir-fry, I can pull a package from the freezer and use it. I realize that most instructions for freezing vegetables recommend blanching to stop the enzymes that will make the product deteriorate. I find, though, that frozen celery holds it's flavor well if I vacuum seal it. Even in regular freezer bags, I can keep it for quite a while. I have gone so far as to rinse the ice crystals off of some that I froze in regular freezer bags and it worked out just fine.

So, I have solved the trouble with celery. :)