Dear Customer,

Celery being a wonderfully pungent vegetable finds its way into a wide variety of dishes and is always popular in salads. If you want a change from a traditional salad you could try slicing it thinly with equal quantities of fennel. Coat the vegetables with a vinaigrette into which a few tablespoonfuls of blue cheese have been blended then finish off with a garnish of fresh dill.
For those who want to eat this vitamin C rich vegetable but are fed up with salads there are many ways you can cook it, maybe adding to a casserole or stew. Celery can make a colourful braised vegetable dish - celery, capsicum pepper and red onion work well together. I am going out on a limb here but I tried this once and it worked! Chop the vegetables coarsely and quite large say 5 cm, fry for a minute in hot olive oil. Place in an oven dish adding a teaspoon of coriander seeds, a bay leaf, a little salt and coarse ground pepper then just cover with boiling water and put in a hot oven until tender. Alternatively the recipe below is a classic soup and one of my favourites:

Cream of Celery Soup

2 tbls olive oil
2 onions, peeled and chopped
450g celery
1.5 pints vegetable stock or water
4 tbls cream
salt and freshly ground black pepper

Heat the oil in a large saucepan and add the onions. Cover and cook over a gentle heat for 10 minutes, until the onions are soft but not browned. Meanwhile scrub the celery and run a potato peeler down each stick to remove any stringy bits. Chop the celery and add it to the onions, stir, cover, and cook for another 5 minutes. Add the stock or water, bring to the boil and leave the soup to cook gently for an hour, or until the celery is very tender. Liquidize the soup and pour it through a sieve back into the saucepan to remove any remaining tough bits of celery. Stir in the cream, salt and pepper to taste and serve hot. You might like to fry a few croutons in olive oil to serve with the soup and crumble a little blue cheese on top.

Thank you very much for starting to return the plastic punnets, something we should have encouraged much earlier.

If you have a good recipe or way of preparing a vegetable that you would not mind sharing with us - please, please email it to me at: isobel@farmaround.co.uk

All best wishes,

Isobel Davies