Celeriac — You’re missing out!
Okay — it’s not very pretty. How to use something that doesn’t look like it should be eaten, but is delicious.
I know you have seen celeriac in your grocery store. It looks like something you would dig up in the garden and throw into the compost heap. In a time when onions displayed in the vegetable aisle are peeled and potatoes are washed, and watermelons are seedless and perfectly round, celeriac is the ugly wallflower at the dance no one wants to partner up with.
Slightly dirty, it has a weird burled wood look to it with a little bit of green at the top. Immediately suspect — this is one of those anomalies that no one knows what to do with, and doesn’t really want to know.
And that’s a shame. Because when cooked or used raw in a salad, celeriac or celery root(as it is more commonly called in America) is delicious and wonderful in many recipes.
I’ve served it to people in various ways and each time I had them look at me like I had a third eye growing on my head when I told them what it was that they were eating. “Celia-what?” they would say, thinking they heard me wrong. I would gleefully retort “celery root” and they would look at me, imaging me lopping off the miniature roots of a stalk of celery. Most people don’t get it.
