It’s been a long day of processing here at Frosty Garden, we’re tearing into our celery harvest! Many of you know that we’re huge proponents of home grown celery, favoring its incredible flavor and being worth every bit of extended effort that it takes to grow from seed!
When we process our celery, we practically have to set up a production line. From harvest to an initial cleaning, then we chop the leaves off (saving them for stocks, of course!), give them a more thorough cleaning and then finally rip them through the food processor to slice them. It might be hard to see here, but our process is organized from right to left in those stages. Still, it takes us many, many hours to process our celery, it’s practically an all day affair!
Most of our celery is destined for blanch and freeze. We do keep several stalks around for fresh eating, of course, but we aim to get the bulk of it prepared for long term preservation. We prefer to measure out specific quantities into our storage bags, which saves us a bit of time (and waste) when we go to use them.
We often forget how much work this is from season to season, soon forgetting the effort once we have frozen bags of celery that we can just dump and go. Usually about an hour into the processing, we remember that it is indeed a bit of a workout!
Our celery has been a little different this year, taking on some very unique seasonal characteristics that we haven’t seen before. The taste is quite sweet, as opposed to the more savory and robust flavor that we usually see. We suspect that the heavy rains have altered things, but it’s still super tasty and we aren’t complaining! We’ve also gotten some massive stalks, celery highly favors access to water and will simply do better if it has constant access to moisture.
We’ve got some fun things planned for later this season with our celery leaves. We’re going to try our hand at making celery salt using the leaves, so we’ll be sure to take you along for that ride when we get to it! It’s really good to save those celery leaves, though, as they make excellent additions into your stocks over the winter. There’s no need to blanch them if you intend to use them up fairly quickly.
It’s a busy day here, so we’re going to get back at it. But, we figured you all might like to see what we’re up to on some of these processing runs! We’re getting into the final phases of getting our garden harvested out, just a handful of things remaining! They all require some work, though, so there’s still much more to do!
