Potato soup? Sounds yummy. I love celery.

I would save a cup or two to use the next time you make dressing.

I grew celery this year - 32 bunches in two varieties. One is lime green, with faily thick stalks and delishious leaves. The other is dark green, thin stalks and about half of the plant is leaves.

Earlier this week I simmered a huge bunch of the dark green celery with leaves. I added an onion, leeks, carrots, garlic, a bay leaf and several garlic cloves. Then I added a can of diced tomatoes, garbanzo beans and a handful or small tubular pasta. It was delish and just what I needed. We've gone from days on end of 90 degrees and sweltering to 50 degrees and windy.

Freeze it in one cup lots and use it here and there...like in soups or turkey dressing...it might make a good base for a sauce for fish too...
Linda C

I would make crab asparagus soup. Normally when I make this soup, I make a broth with celery, a dried cayenne chili (or more), and the tough parts of the asparagus and then put that in the food processor (works better than the blender for stringy vegetables) and strain it through a chinois, forcing out much of the puréed vegetables with the wooden pestle. I tend to use crab or lobster stock instead of chicken stock, but chicken is fine also. Then to make the soup, all I have to do is add the cooked crab meat and cooked asparagus/tips. If I don't use hot chilies in the broth, I add a bit of Sriracha hot sauce.

Lars

Crab soup from leftover steamed Chesapeake Bay crabs!
Definitely!!

Thanks for all the ideas. I thought the broth would have been perfect for the crab and aspragus soup but asparagus is out of season here and what's in the stores is flavorless.

I didn't have any steamed crabs but that got me thinking of that rich broth in the traditional MD crab-vegetable soup and that led me to snapper soup.

One of our farmers' markets sells frozen snapper meat so DH ran up and got a pack and an extra bottle of sherry. So that's what we ended up with and invited a couple of friends who like it to come over and share it. The celery stock was perfect with the turtle.

I once had vegetable soup with an extreme celery taste and now that's the only way I like vegetable soup. I haven't even been able to get the taste of celery in it as much as I would like. I bet your celery broth would fit the bill for that.

My DH taught me to peel celery. I hate to admit is was something I had never thought about. And he doesn't even cook. Just a hint for future stringy celery.

Beverlyal - grow celery! It is easy! I bought plants but next year I will try seed. It is fabulous! It freezes well and I use it for the base of stocks. The consistency is kind of mushy when cooked so I remove it from the broth. I am also drying some stalks with leaves in my oven today at 150 degrees. I was out in my yard picking tomatoes and my neighbor came over to my fence and said "what smells so good?" There is also an abundance of homegrown celery at the local farmers markets here in Minnesota.

Teresa, as much as I would like to, I can't have a garden. As far as celery is concerned though, it can't be grown in my climate. I suppose it must be a cold weather plant. Can't grow head lettuce here either.

That's too bad. But isn't celery grown in California?

I would probably follow through with the original plan. Thicken it and add cream. Maybe do that with one quart and use the other quart to make a second kind of soup with other vegetables added. Or freeze one cup portions for future use. Or make V-8 juice.

Jim

I don't know where celery is grown. California can grow a lot of things we can't grow here.

Celery is probably grown down in the Monterey/Salinas area where broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, artichokes, peppers, spinach, strawberries, and many other "salad" crops are grown. The marine layer keeps things cool.

Very pale, almost white celery is a traditional offering at Amish and Mennonite wedding dinners here in PA. If you drive past a farm and see a field with upright lengths of PVC pipe, you can be sure there's a wedding coming up. They let the celery plants get to a certain height and then cover them to let only a small amount of sun in so somehow they don't develop the green color.

Interesting tradition. I wonder what it tastes like. And I wonder what the significance of the white celery is versus regular green celery.