Tiniest Celery
I was so happy to have gotten Chinese celery from the Asian market a while back, to make Water Boiled Beef with. Later, I was at the Saturday Market at my usual vegetable seller's stall, and I noticed that they had selderij. Now, I had always assumed that, despite the similarities between the words selderij and celery, selderij must mean parsley (the Italian parsley) because that's what it looked like to me. But this time, I actually picked up a bunch and put it to my nose. Lo and behold, it had the celery fragrance!
I bought a bunch, not knowing what I would do with it. First, I looked up celery on wikipedia, and indeed found that this is what some called "wild celery." I put it next to my computer mouse so you can see how truly tiny this celery is, even skinnier than Chinese celery!
Turns out that the reason why Chinese celery was a "seasonal produce" at my Asian market, is that celery traditionally has seasons. It used to be a winter vegetable, and people would eat it for its salt content as a tonic. I decided to make a simple salad out of it with a Sichuan spicy vinaigrette. It was okay, but the flavor of this celery is so strong, you should really use it more like parsley.
Oh and by the way, yesterday the vegetable seller taught me that the big celery, the one we have in the US which we eat with buffalo wings, is called bleekselderij. That would be pale celery (bleek=pale, selderij=celery). The bleekselderij I bought in order to make jambalaya was imported from Spain.
