#pickled celery

[honeymuse2002]

I made pickled onions (again) and pickled celery (for the 1st time) 🥹🥬❤️ The celery is gonna be awesome with my tuna salad 😍

[marlowesberries]

Tried a pickling recipe I saw on a Gordon Ramsay video

Hope it works but I think I messed it up 😔😔

[thefreshaussie]

pickled celery

Have you ever made pickled celery? Simple to make, crunchy & lively, pickled celery is perfect served as part of a charcuterie or cheese platter. Rather than opening a jar of pickles, it’s easy to make your own pickled veg. These pickles add a little interest on heaping platters of sharing food leading up to the holidays & festive season. Serving one or two things you’ve cooked, such as a chutney…

View On WordPress

[guardians-of-the-food]

Pickled Celery

[mealsforsquares]

Another fancy dinner

So to end the week of eating no animal products, it was time to make another elaborate, multi-course dinner, except entirely vegan. Lo’s only request was that it be Asian-inspired. Which is handy enough, since that’s one of the primary sources of non-stupid vegan cuisine in the first place.

So the first course (once again, there are no pictures, because I am not the dude that takes pictures) was the unorthodox choice of a stir-fry. Culinary historian, food critic, and super-cranky dude John Hess* is unilaterally opposed to spicy appetizers, insisting that spicy foods deaden the palate and render the eater unsuited for the remainder of the meal. I find that I like to start spicy and then take a course or two to take it down from there. Since the other person I’m cooking for in these situations, Lo, is as into spicy food as I am, I generally go spicy.

In this case, the stir-fry started out simply (it was replacing, after all, the traditional idea of serving a salad at the beginning of the meal). Some oil got flavored with diced bird chilis, some minced ginger and some garlic. Then, in order, were fried onions, celery, carrots and finally some asparagus. The result was then tossed with a little bit of sesame oil and some soy sauce. The result was a spicy, sweet, aromatic dish that was also satisfyingly savory.

The second course was a soup, designed to play on basically the same flavors. I made a broth of mushrooms, lemongrass, ginger, garlic and leeks, which I poured over a mixture of minced squash (for sweetness), beech mushrooms (for some earthier notes and also a chewy textural note) garlic (for depth), minced bird chilis (for spice) and miso (for body). It was garnished with sliced green onions and chopped peanuts, which added a necessary crunch to the delicious, fiery soup.

Having brought the meal to the edge of what was easily-handled in terms of spice, I backed off by a course of dumplings. Inspired in both placement and composition by the traditional-Italian pasta course, the dumplings were regular rice-paper dumplings that I filled with a mixture that was based on peas (which are starchy enough to bind, but sweet enough to poke out through the rest of the mixture), and included some chili flakes, garlic and untoasted sesame seed oil. The dumplings were pan-fried to get some crunch on the outside. On the plate with them was a salad of raw red pepper slices, pickled radishes and carrots (pickled in a brine of mustard seeds, chili flakes, sugar and salt) and salt-pickled celery**. The salad was left mostly as-is, being dressed only with a little bit of toasted sesame oil. The dumplings were served with two sauces, one a basic dipping sauce of soy sauce, toasted sesame oil, lime juice, and hoisin, and the other a kimchi puree (kimchi and untoasted sesame oil). The cool, starchy dumplings reset the palate, and the pickled vegetables and sauces cut their sweet, solid flavor nicely. This was probably my favorite course of the six.

With everything brought back down, the next course was the “seafood” course, which of course meant a salad of wakame, pea sprouts, salt-pickled squash and onions, and brine-pickled oyster and beech mushrooms (this brine was of salt, sugar, lemongrass, garlic and onions). It was dressed with a vinaigrette of red wine vinegar, sesame oil, soy sauce, horseradish and chinese mustard. Served alongside it were trumpet mushroom “scallops”.

The “scallops” were made by slicing the stem of the mushroom into basically scallop-shaped portions, and then marinating them in soy sauce, vegetable oil, red wine vinegar and brown rice syrup. They were marinated alongside some leeks that were cut into the same shape and seared with them***.

The fifth course was a slice of tofu which had been marinated in soy sauce, harissa, brown rice syrup, red wine vinegar and sesame oil, then broiled under a low broiler for about ten minutes per side. This dried out the outside nicely, giving it an admirable crust, but leaving the inside creamy and moist. Tofu is a lovely ingredient when it’s treated as its own thing, and not as means to an end, and this was an excellent preparation of it. It was served atop stir-fried mei fun noodles and stir-fried scallions. It was the simplest of the courses, and also the one that left the diners the fullest.

Dessert, then, was a simple rice pudding of short-grain rice, almond milk, nutmeg, cardamom, currants and apple cider syrup which was both nicely not-too-sweet and satisfyingly soothing after the array of flavors and textures that preceded.

* who is, legitimately, someone whose work I admire a great deal, especially being at the very forefront of the crusade against over-packaged fake “food” masquerading as something people should eat. He was against factory production and the celebrity “chef” that mostly ignored the idea of technique in favor of making something superficially impressive out of pre-made ingredients (with a special hatred of Craig Claiborne). He also crusaded hard against nursing home conditions.

** salt-pickled celery is such a revelation in pickled vegetables that I immediately became angry that more people don’t make it for everything all the time.

*** this exists at the intersection of Lo’s love for leeks and my love of elaborate refernce jokes, and is, in fact, inspired by Top Chef, which once saw a particularly dumb contestant go home for “visioning” a sliced leek as a scallop. Turns out they taste pretty good, but are fussy and dumb to work with in that form.