Friday, September 10, 2010

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. :)

2 comments:

  1. Excellent idea. I am wondering how much food I will end up with going from two large upright freezers to a 7 cubic foot chest freezer. I have been dehydrating some things to save space. I may have to try dehydrating celery because I do the same as you as far as wasting it goes and no one likes to waste food. Might as well toss money in the trash.

    ReplyDelete
  2. debbieo, it will certainly be a challenge learning and wrapping your mind around a different streamlined way of managing your food. I am so glad you have the extra trailer at least!

    ReplyDelete