Sunday Spices - Celery Seed

I must confess, I absolutely loathed celery when I was small. Probably because my Dad always cooked it in the same pot as my beloved carrots, and the flavour often leaked from one to the other. Stories of the Conor next door eating the stuff raw made no impact, and then later hearing that some people eat celery with PEANUT BUTTER (another taste I developed rather later in my life) truly horrified me.

I'm not sure that I'd go all out and say that I now love celery or anything, but it's definitely part of many flavours, so I've been paying more attention to it of late. At Christmas, I made two big batches of stuffing from the recipe we used when I was growing up (a quarter pound of butter, a pound of mushrooms, two celery stalks, an apple, and a whole bunch of breadcrumbs, all diced, chopped, combined and baked. Sausage meat can be included too, but the sausages here are so demanding in their flavour that I wasn't happy including any...)

With a whole bunch of celery left over from these, I decided to make some soup. But the star surprise was that in Whole Foods I found a packet of celery seeds, which made the soup far spicier and celery-er, and turned out being my new favourite spice! Did you know that it's mostly grown in India? Or that the Ancient Greeks, particularly those occult-obsessed residents of Samothrace, considered it a chthonic plant, heavily associated with death and the underworld? Not so humble now, eh?

I have a whole jar of celery seeds now, which are apparently also great for canning, preserving and pickling. Dunno if I'll be getting THAT far, but I'll definitely add a little for some richness to the next pasta sauce I try.