A kitchen triumph

Yesterday, I made cream of celery soup (photo up top) for the first time, and it was a triumph. It was so good, in fact, that I kept saying that out loud all evening. That’s not a reaction I typically have when I try a new recipe, so it’s definitely one I’ll plan to repeat.

It came about out of a sort of necessity: I had some celery that was fading, and while I knew I could revive it from it’s limpness, I decided I’d be better off using it all up at once. The first thing that popped into my head was cream of celery soup.

When I was a kid, my mother would often make me Campbell’s tinned cream of celery soup for lunch, and I loved it. She preferred their cream of mushroom soup, but in those days I didn’t like mushrooms (ironic, since I do now but have to avoid them because they can trigger a gout attack).

I also wanted to make the soup because it would something different. Over the course the week I had the celery, I’d had a couple stalks as snack, used some in chicken noodle soup, and on Thursday night, I also made a garden salad with some. By Friday, the celery was definitely much more limp. Cooking it was the solution, and the soup was to be the vehicle.

I Googled for a recipe, and one of the first I found is the one I actually used. It was simple to follow and turned out so well that I descibed is on social media as “awesome”, and I also declared:

I think this was probably the nicest soup I’ve ever made, which is a big call, because I’ve made a lot over the years, the past few in particular. I’ll definitely make this again, and without just waiting to use up celery. Yum!

I varied the recipe a bit: I didn’t have any leeks, so I used two onions. I also added a tiny bit of dried dill and a pinch of dried basil. The chicken stock was actually the dried sort, something I usually use to boost flavour, not to make stock, though in the past I’ve done that. This was low-salt and from a well-known brand sold in NZ, so it’s good quality, and, since I didn’t have any ogther stock and wasn’t keen on going to buy some liquid stock, I made do. It turned out just fine.

One part of the recipe I ignored: I didn’t sauté the small batch of celery separately, as the recipe called for, because I didn’t have enough. It was awesome without doing it, though, so maybe it’s not really necessary? I suppose I’ll have to try it to know for sure.

The recipe suggested parsley as a garnish, so I went outside and snipped some from one of the plants I have in the Vegepod. It was nice—maybe not totally necessary, but nice.

The photo at the bottom of this post is my lunch today: The soup (with freshly ground black pepper instead of parsley, mainly because it was raining and I didn’t want to go out and snip off some more). I served it with a toasted piece of the breadmaker bread I made a few days ago. The crust is lovely and crunchy when I toast it, so it made a really nice add-on for my lunch (which was necessary because I didn’t leave myself very much soup to have today…).

Maybe I’ll buy celery when it’s on special specifically to make the soup, rather than making it to use up celery I have on hand. A friend suggested roasting the celery first, but I rreally liked the simplicity of the recipe, and how few few steps it has (especially if I don’t bother with sautéing a separate pan of celery). Maybe, maybe not.

I’ve had plenty of kitchen successes—and failures—over the years, but last night’s soup is probably the highlight of them all. It’s nice when that happens.

Lunch today: Leftover soup and a toasted piece of homemade bread.