Stuffed celery (p195), like my filled croissants the other day, can hardly be called a recipe. It's really just a brief description of how to prepare the celery, with a few different options for fillings. Still, I'd counted it as a recipe, so it had to be done.
I've definitely come across celery stuffed with cottage cheese before - and I don't like it. Not a big fan of cottage cheese really. So I avoided that filling suggestion and instead went for two of the other options: cream cheese and walnut, and crunchy peanut butter and bacon. Conveniently, I had all of the required ingredients to hand - in fact, the opportunity to use up leftover celery and cream cheese was a major factor in selecting this recipe.
I was fascinated by the peanut butter and bacon combination. Peanut butter is a fairly common pairing with celery, but the addition of bacon was a new idea to me - I couldn't wait to try it. Grabbing a rasher of bacon out of the freezer, I chopped it up small, and zapped the bits in the microwave. This cooking method made the bacon slightly rubbery, but I couldn't be bothered getting out my frypan for such a small quantity. Then I added the peanut butter, which softened up quickly around the hot bacon, and combined very easily.
I set the peanut butter/bacon filling aside to cool down a bit while I chopped up walnuts and stirred them through some cream cheese. When both bowls of filling were ready, I engaged in the slightly fiddly task of filling the celery stalks.
Soon I had my celery filled and chopped into short sections, placed on a plate and was ready to watch my DVD. The stuffed celery made quite a good movie snack really - at least it kept me from ransacking the cupboards for nibbles. I liked both versions: they each had a nice mixture of crisp, crunchy and smooth textures, and both were rich enough to contrast with the freshness of the celery.
One downside was that the celery was a little stringy, which ruined the texture somewhat. The recipe does actually say to remove the strings, but clearly I wasn't paying attention.
The peanut butter and bacon filling was my favourite of the two: the saltiness of the bacon was a great addition to the peanut butter, and that stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth feeling was counteracted by the celery. That's not to say that the cream cheese and walnut filling didn't have its merits - in fact, I'm starting to think that celery filling might be an area that warrants a little experimentation, especially since I often end up throwing out unused leftover celery. Anyone got any creative ideas?
I use a potato peeler lightly over the outside of the sticks to remove obvious strings. leftover sticks are quite nice on their own sliced lengthwise and chopped into cubes and mixed with similarly chopped raw carrot to munch on. Rabbit food I know but I rather like munching on raw veg.
ReplyDeleteLittle cubes of celery are quite nice tossed with your salad greens.c