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So my sister has, for reasons I can probably guess but we’ll just say they’re for marketing (ok the real reason is that i am sure they have a shitload of this stuff left over from the shares because it would be suboptimal to give everyone too much of one thing in a CSA box), devoted this week on her Instagram to what she’s calling the Celeriac Challenge.
You might not be familiar with celeriac. It is the root of the celery plant, but grown as a special variety where the root is prioritized. It’s a large, up to about the size of a woman’s fist (well, mine anyway, I have small hands), starchy root, and it’s tasty and can be used much like a potato can be, but it’s flavorful and can even turn sweet with cooking. The crucial thing about it, is that it’s a storage crop. While non-grocery-store celery is an insanely flavorful, short-lived beast (if you taste it, you’ll never want grocery store celery again, which is too damn bad because while the grocery store stuff is functionally immortal in your fridge, the slender delicious stalks of farm-grown heritage celery will last like two days before they start to wilt and maybe a week before they’re no longer usable, and you can freeze them (chopped up, it’s easy) but it’s nowhere near as glorious), the celeriac root will happily sit in your root cellar for… mm, I think six to eight months is not unreasonable to expect. You have to monitor storage crops, of course, and pull and use immediately any that show any mold or softening or anything– but how did our ancestors live??? Storage crops in a cellar, and you’d pick through them just about daily, and the strongest would last you until the next harvest. Household stewardship like that is a full-time fucking job.
Anyway. This past week, she’s been posting things every day– the typical things, like a slaw made with sliced celeriac to eat on tacos, whole roasted celeriac with rosemary and pan gravy, but then she’s moved on to unexpected things like celeriac in bread like zucchini.
Last night she posted that she’d made celeriac ice cream. I am not making this up.
[image description: an Instagram screenshot showing a little glass bowl of very yellow ice cream.] “I think I’ve peaked on the #celeriacchallenge,” she writes, elaborating that Farmkid initially accepted it but then rejected it for, of all things, being “too eggy”. Clearly, we can deduce that this was a custard-based ice cream. Extra hilarity from yours truly: i happen to know she only owns an ice cream machine because our older sister was bored and bought me one on the Internet while deployed to Iraq in 2003, and I finally brought it over to the farm two years ago because she was more likely to use it, and it has seen very heavy rotation ever since then. When she posts the recipe, I will share it.
But I also thought the thing she posted today was pretty good.
“This morning, I was feeling down on myself because I didn’t make a new recipe for the #celeriacchallenge, we just ate the celeriac/carrot quick bread from the other night, paired with![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
argylecheesefarmer yogurt (a staple in our house!) and some frozen strawberries from our garden. Then it occurred to me that repurposing leftovers is an important tool for someone committed to home cooked foods made with few processed ingredients. We have to find efficiencies somewhere, and here, what that looks like is making larger batches of foods and then incorporating them over several meals so that my labor is not 100% replicated 3 meals a day, 7 days a week. This is sustainability in my home and my body. Instead of scrubbing celeriac and shredding them to make pancakes, I did yoga, fed my people leftovers, and thanked my past self.”
That’s a super important thing to keep in mind, and is related to the earlier thing I reblogged about plastic hairbrushes. It’s really easy for things to get co-opted by this commercial culture we have, where it’s all Instagram aspirational, and everything is about pushing yourself to your limits and buying new “lifestyle” shit all the time, even when you’re trying to Save The Environment or Practice Self-Care or even things like being thrifty, it’s all most visibly and easily predicated on Buying All New Shit To Remake Yourself In A Better Image. Mostly I’ve seen “leftovers” repackaged as Meal Prep For Which You Need To Buy All-Matching Containers To Hold The Prepped Meals into which you must aesthetically arrange each portion like it’s a goddamn competition so you can photograph it and put it up on your Instagram.
[this might as well be a plug for my sister’s farm. it doesn’t really need the plug, but i’m doing it anyway, at least for context for anyone new following me who’s otherwise gonna be real confused in the spring when I suddenly stop being an office worker and start mysteriously posting photos of a farm and a kid that’s not mine. follow [Bad username or site: laughing @ earth] on Instagram. subscribe to her newsletter at www.laughingearth.farm. If you don’t want me to just repost her shit here, LOL.
Also, another plug: look up your area on localharvest dot org (sorry that’s US-only, if you’re elsewhere, a websearch might bring something up!) and see if there’s a CSA nearby. It’s not for everyone but it’s more attainable than you think, and this is the time of year in this hemisphere where they’re open for sign-ups. Eat local, it’s a way you can make a difference in your community. If it’s not possible for you, at least you can learn a little more about your foodshed and what’s produced near you, and make more informed choices about your food habits.]
So my sister has, for reasons I can probably guess but we’ll just say they’re for marketing (ok the real reason is that i am sure they have a shitload of this stuff left over from the shares because it would be suboptimal to give everyone too much of one thing in a CSA box), devoted this week on her Instagram to what she’s calling the Celeriac Challenge.
You might not be familiar with celeriac. It is the root of the celery plant, but grown as a special variety where the root is prioritized. It’s a large, up to about the size of a woman’s fist (well, mine anyway, I have small hands), starchy root, and it’s tasty and can be used much like a potato can be, but it’s flavorful and can even turn sweet with cooking. The crucial thing about it, is that it’s a storage crop. While non-grocery-store celery is an insanely flavorful, short-lived beast (if you taste it, you’ll never want grocery store celery again, which is too damn bad because while the grocery store stuff is functionally immortal in your fridge, the slender delicious stalks of farm-grown heritage celery will last like two days before they start to wilt and maybe a week before they’re no longer usable, and you can freeze them (chopped up, it’s easy) but it’s nowhere near as glorious), the celeriac root will happily sit in your root cellar for… mm, I think six to eight months is not unreasonable to expect. You have to monitor storage crops, of course, and pull and use immediately any that show any mold or softening or anything– but how did our ancestors live??? Storage crops in a cellar, and you’d pick through them just about daily, and the strongest would last you until the next harvest. Household stewardship like that is a full-time fucking job.
Anyway. This past week, she’s been posting things every day– the typical things, like a slaw made with sliced celeriac to eat on tacos, whole roasted celeriac with rosemary and pan gravy, but then she’s moved on to unexpected things like celeriac in bread like zucchini.
Last night she posted that she’d made celeriac ice cream. I am not making this up.
[image description: an Instagram screenshot showing a little glass bowl of very yellow ice cream.] “I think I’ve peaked on the #celeriacchallenge,” she writes, elaborating that Farmkid initially accepted it but then rejected it for, of all things, being “too eggy”. Clearly, we can deduce that this was a custard-based ice cream. Extra hilarity from yours truly: i happen to know she only owns an ice cream machine because our older sister was bored and bought me one on the Internet while deployed to Iraq in 2003, and I finally brought it over to the farm two years ago because she was more likely to use it, and it has seen very heavy rotation ever since then. When she posts the recipe, I will share it.
But I also thought the thing she posted today was pretty good.
“This morning, I was feeling down on myself because I didn’t make a new recipe for the #celeriacchallenge, we just ate the celeriac/carrot quick bread from the other night, paired with
argylecheesefarmer yogurt (a staple in our house!) and some frozen strawberries from our garden. Then it occurred to me that repurposing leftovers is an important tool for someone committed to home cooked foods made with few processed ingredients. We have to find efficiencies somewhere, and here, what that looks like is making larger batches of foods and then incorporating them over several meals so that my labor is not 100% replicated 3 meals a day, 7 days a week. This is sustainability in my home and my body. Instead of scrubbing celeriac and shredding them to make pancakes, I did yoga, fed my people leftovers, and thanked my past self.”That’s a super important thing to keep in mind, and is related to the earlier thing I reblogged about plastic hairbrushes. It’s really easy for things to get co-opted by this commercial culture we have, where it’s all Instagram aspirational, and everything is about pushing yourself to your limits and buying new “lifestyle” shit all the time, even when you’re trying to Save The Environment or Practice Self-Care or even things like being thrifty, it’s all most visibly and easily predicated on Buying All New Shit To Remake Yourself In A Better Image. Mostly I’ve seen “leftovers” repackaged as Meal Prep For Which You Need To Buy All-Matching Containers To Hold The Prepped Meals into which you must aesthetically arrange each portion like it’s a goddamn competition so you can photograph it and put it up on your Instagram.
[this might as well be a plug for my sister’s farm. it doesn’t really need the plug, but i’m doing it anyway, at least for context for anyone new following me who’s otherwise gonna be real confused in the spring when I suddenly stop being an office worker and start mysteriously posting photos of a farm and a kid that’s not mine. follow [Bad username or site: laughing @ earth] on Instagram. subscribe to her newsletter at www.laughingearth.farm. If you don’t want me to just repost her shit here, LOL.
Also, another plug: look up your area on localharvest dot org (sorry that’s US-only, if you’re elsewhere, a websearch might bring something up!) and see if there’s a CSA nearby. It’s not for everyone but it’s more attainable than you think, and this is the time of year in this hemisphere where they’re open for sign-ups. Eat local, it’s a way you can make a difference in your community. If it’s not possible for you, at least you can learn a little more about your foodshed and what’s produced near you, and make more informed choices about your food habits.]
