Best Celery Recipes

Photo and recipe courtesy of HUROM.

These adorable cucumber-celery snails are fun to eat and filled with lots of good-for-you vegetables like chickpeas, celery, and cucumbers. Even the pickiest of eaters will enjoy them! Recipe courtesy of Bolthouse Farms.

Crunchy celery contrasts with sweet, tender citrus in this lovely salad that perfectly exhibits how a touch of highly flavorful ingredients — balsamic vinegar and feta — can elevate a dish without adding too much in the way of fat or sodium.

January’s toe-numbingly cold weather in New York discouraged long walks to our favorite farmers’ market, and for days on end my wife and I didn’t feel like looking much beyond the refrigerator for ingredients. This was a challenge one evening when we needed a dish to share the menu with Chinese-style red-cooked pork belly drawn from Fuchsia Dunlop’s book Land of Plenty (published in the U.K. as Sichuan Cookery).The least unlikely vegetable in the fridge was a celery root (celeriac). True, it is not commonly used in Chinese cooking, yet it has a fine flavor and, when shredded and eaten raw or cooked as in this recipe, an appealing crunchy texture. Its spheroid form and solidity reminded me of potatoes, which in turn evoked an excellent stir-fry that a Chinese friend used to cook for us: julienned potatoes with chiles (I think she used poblanos, but I could be wrong). The potatoes were left slightly al dente; though underdone potatoes are taboo in most cooking traditions, the thin shreds were delightful to eat, and the potato flavor was somehow heightened by quick cooking.Using celery root in the same way was an experiment that succeeded; absent any fresh chiles, I used a sweet pepper and infused the frying oil with Sichuan peppercorns to add heat and tie the dish to the regional origin of Ms. Dunlop’s red-cooked pork. This worked well in a subtle but palpable way, and the simple, clear-flavored dish provided just what we needed: a contrast with the intense, fat-heavy pork belly. 

The French may not be known for their love of raw vegetables, but this rémoulade proves that this stereotype does not always ring true.This recipe is courtesy of David Lebovitz.