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Green the New Black, Celery the New Snack

by · March 15th, 2009
Advice, Cooking, Family & Kids, Vegetables

celery

Celery? This is not what people mean when they think of an after school snack. No, they imagine milk and cookies and an apron-wearing parent in an aromatic kitchen with a wooden spoon in hand. Now, however, once you consider trans fats, high fructose corn syrup, cholesterol, hormones and artificial preservatives, celery emerges as a big winner. It’s hard to imagine celery in the same category as homemade ginger snaps or chocolate chip cookies. After all, snacks are supposed to embody the child’s relationship to the parent. And if that isn’t enough pressure, after-school snacks should be something warm and sweet, welcoming the child back home from the wilds of the outer world.

So its good news that there are 213 ways of preparing celery that can transform this cold, hard vegetable that is strong of taste into an inviting snack, soup, appetizer or side dish. Celery is nutritious. It’s actually delicious, calorie negative, and originally used in the ancient Mediterranean basin as a cure for colds, flu, water retention and digestive ailments. Winners of the Nemean Games in Ancient Greece wore celery as a victory symbol. The Romans wore it about their necks to recover from a night of partying. It’s an aphrodisiac, and in Umbria there is a yearly festival in celebration of black celery, considered to be a gourmet delicacy. You can even use it as Karpas in the seder.

Who knew?

So when the kids get home from school, or they need to nibble while dinner is prepared, try serving Celery Crunch. All you have to do is chop three or four stalks of celery into bite size pieces. You can augment this with similarly diced cucumbers, fennel, and/or carrots. Squeeze the juice of one half lime over all and optionally sprinkle with a pinch or two of Cayenne pepper.

After all, homes these days are zesty and active, and parents carry cell phones as well as wooden spoons. Home plate is where ideas happen and imaginations roar, and our kids get to be their own person, as well entirely rough around the edges. Why shouldn’t a snack be crisp, exciting and invigorating to the senses?

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11 Responses to “Green the New Black, Celery the New Snack”

  1. Lisa Fine Says:
    March 15th, 2009 at 3:09 pm

    It’s a coincidence that you just wrote about celery. Two weeks ago I visited my parents, and my dad bought a new stash of celery, which he likes to eat with his sandwiches at lunch. Then I bought some earlier this week to have with my lunches. It’s a crispy, easy, healthy snack.

  2. Lev Says:
    March 15th, 2009 at 4:28 pm

    Any recommendation on what to do with the leafy tops? I always feel bad throwing that part away…

  3. Susan Says:
    March 15th, 2009 at 4:47 pm

    Lev – use them as you would the stems. Flavor, season and or cook them. Most of the nutrition is in the leaves!

  4. Carol Says:
    March 15th, 2009 at 6:21 pm

    That’s some nice looking celery! I always check out the celery for the leaves. The more leaves, the better. I use the leaves in anything that I’d put celery in, especially soups and beans.

  5. balabusta Says:
    March 15th, 2009 at 9:20 pm

    It bothers me that you are pushing celery’s properties as a negative-calorie food as a snack for children. Perhaps it’s because my child is young, or maybe it’s because I was raised with a very pronounced weight-loss mindset, but–I find this disturbing. (And you think celery is a new snack? Ha. Celery was my old snack. Amazing that back in the 1970s everyone also knew that celery made you thin.)

    My kid is also young enough that a surprise sprinkling with hot pepper would pretty much guarantee he’d never eat a vegetable again.

  6. Simcha Daniel Says:
    March 15th, 2009 at 9:37 pm

    Unfortunately, the one vegetable that my kids won’t go near is celery. For a while there, we kept it out of the house, but I LOVE raw celery, and it seems to like me right back!

    It takes a while to realize that it’s ok for the kids to not like what we put on the table, but getting up to fix an egg after putting in an hour to cook dinner gets old. So snacks are more often fruit or PB&J. Ah well.

  7. Susan Says:
    March 15th, 2009 at 9:51 pm

    Balabusta – you are right to recognize that different kids have different taste thresholds, and no matter what you read don’t do it if it isn’t right for your kid. Regarding the negative calorie properties of celery, I agree that benefit doesn’t apply to kids. It is however an interesting feature of this vegetable that you burn more calories eating and digesting than you take in. I am also surprised that people find using celery as a snack a novel idea. Perhaps in this culture we so easily lose touch with the simplest and easiest, especially when it comes to food.

  8. Susan Says:
    March 15th, 2009 at 9:54 pm

    Simcha -
    Thanks for making a good point. It is okay for kids not to like what we put on the table, but it is annoying for us. I have found that sometimes it is easiest to put out a selection of raw vegetables before dinner with some good healthy yoghurt dips. Then, at meal time, you know that they have received some good vitamins and minerals, and it doesn’t matter if they leave some of their food on the plate.

  9. Mia Rut Says:
    March 15th, 2009 at 10:56 pm

    Last summer I was in Israel and volunteered to help with some gleanings where we ended up helping harvest some surplus celery. As much as I’ve cooked with celery and love celery root (shredded with a drizzle of olive oil and a dash of salt) I had never spent an afternoon up to my elbows in that much celery before.

    Apparently fresh-from-the-ground celery produces a natural oil that can burn the skin after it is exposed to direct sunlight (and we were in Israel after all so there was plenty of sun). All of the field laborers knew of this and wore long sleeves while handling the celery. Us volunteers were not given such a warning and to this day we all carry our scars (yes, physical scars) from our celery burns!

  10. Susan Says:
    March 16th, 2009 at 5:55 am

    Thank you Mia for your thoughtful comment and directing us to you post about harvesting celery. It reminds us to think about food in a more holistic context – where it comes from, what labor is involved, and who enables its production. I hope that the celery lovers among us will be all the more appreciative of those who endure the harvesting process!

  11. Arlyn Boltax Says:
    March 16th, 2009 at 1:46 pm

    Yikes! Celery burns-who knew?

    Our favorite celery snack: ANTS ON A LOG
    Fill the trench of the celery stick with peanut or almond butter, top with raisins and voila! I have recently tried cream cheese in place of nut butters because of the no-nuts policy in my kids’s schools. It’s also tasty, but I have to say this snack does not pack and travel well-it gets kind of messy-best it consume on the spot.

    And Balabusta-celery was my “old” snack too! And I also have not told my children that it’s a negative calorie food. At this point, they don’t know much (or anything) about calories and I’d prefer to keep it that way. But the memory made my smile relfectively!

    One last thing: raw celery can be hard to digest for toddlers and preschoolers who tend not to chew so well (they also don’t like those “stringies”,as my 4 year old calls them) or those dealing with IBS or other digestive issues. But you can always cook it!

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