Love it or hate it: celery (soup)

I’ve been watching plant-based YouTube and I’ve heard a couple of times now about how celery isn’t as well liked as I thought it was. I personally love celery. It’s cheap, it’s easy to work with (raw or cooked), and has a strong flavor.

Looking through Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables, I came across a pretty simple way to make use of a whole head of celery. If you aren’t sure what to do with one of yours — here you have it!

Six Seasons isn’t a plant-based book exclusively, but the way most of the recipes are constructed, it isn’t too painful substituting plant-based ingredients instead. For today’s example, I needed to sub both butter and heavy cream.

For the butter, I’m using a method from Dr. Greger’s cookbook: How Not to Diet, which swaps oil or butter with water or veggie broth. So instead of sautéing your vegetables at the beginning of a recipe, you end up steaming/boiling them a bit. (Is that what “par-boiling” is?)

For the heavy cream, I googled to find some ideas. I have cashews, so grabbed a handful (about 1/2 cup) and let them soak in boiling-warm water for a while (like probably a few hours, but I lost track and it doesn’t really matter). You take those soften, soaked cashews and blend them with whatever plant-based milk you have on hand making sure it is unsweetened/unflavored. I have macadamia nut milk because that sh*t was cheap at Costco.

Getting started, throw some water/stock into the pot — you need enough to cook all of the chopped celery and onion, so like…3/4 cup? I never measure in this step because it’s just going to get evaporated and doesn’t matter. The book says to cook until tender — 8 minutes. Make sure you don’t brown the veggies in this receipe. It’ll probably affect the color of the final result or something.

Add the veggie stock and let it simmer for 30 minutes. By this time, your celery and onion should be soft enough to blend. Blend it! I use an immersion blender so I don’t have to take all of that out of the pot. It should be smooth now, so add in your heavy cream substitute (whatever you ended up using) and cook for a few more minutes to let it all combine. Test for salt/pepper goodness and all that.

You’re done! Serve and top with the left over celery leaves (if you had any) plus any nuts/seeds you have on hand and dried fruit that’s been soaked in water or vinegar (your choice!). I like to mix in some red pepper flakes, but you could do any mix of spices!

I love cooking as a hobby, but I’m not professionally trained and patience is not one of my virtues. I plan to share more recipes like this one, so I hope you find them useful. Que aproveche!