Celery Soup

While sorting through my photos from the past fall to decide which to keep, which to delete, and which to develop (yeah, I still do that), I realized that I never posted about our celery soup:

As you can see, the only photo I have is from a lunch at work, when I had leftover celery soup and some rolls at my desk. I don't have any pictures of the celery, either, because we were just kind of stupid with the celery this year. We let it grow all season and kind of forgot about it – meaning we didn't cook with it much at all until Thanksgiving and various winter dinner stuffings. Then as freezing temps threatened to kill it (and by threatened, I mean froze it solid, but somehow not to the point of total death), we finally brought in all the stalks we had left.

So yeah, we didn't really utilize our celery through the growing season to the best of our ability, but we made up for our carelessness with a delicious celery soup. To make it, Kirk cut up and sauteed leeks and celery in olive oil until the leeks were softened, then added that (plus salt and pepper) to some chicken stock to simmer for a good while until everything was soft enough to blitz in the blender for a smooth soup. We ate it that way one night, and it was very green tasting (and not a huge hit with the kids).

It was better the second time, though, when we took the leftovers of that soup and added heavy cream and a bit of honey, which took out some of the bitterness of the celery. That's according to Kirk and Jonas, though – I never had a problem with any bitterness, because I like celery in general.

That second, cream of celery version is the one pictured. This I would make again to use up surplus celery for sure. In the future, though, I hope to be a little better attuned to the celery crop and enjoy it a lot more along the way, so maybe we won't have such a giant pile of it to deal with when the weather turns wintery.