Our veg box arrived today and I have to say, at the risk of sounding a little spoilt and petulant, this week I was slightly underwhelmed. Here it is (along with LP’s hat!)…
Now don’t get me wrong, it’s always fun to find celeriac in your veg box, and I do love my butternut squashes. Our avocado & cucumber were present and correct, and we got spuds, green peppers, lettuce, celery & bananas.
But my main issue was all that colouredy stuff off to the left, the fruit. I am not a fruit lover (except bananas), and I very rarely eat citrus fruit, I find it very acidic.
Our veg box agreement is for only 2 euro of fruit each week to be comprised solely of bananas (avocados are considered a vegetable for their billing purposes). Last week there was a pile of oranges in the box, but I thought maybe there had been a little mixup, this week 5 oranges and 3 lemons have joined last week’s oranges in our now quite-full fruit basket. Hmm. And no carrots or courgettes or anything stirfry-ish, presumably because of the oranges and lemons. Who needs 3 lemons a week anyway?
Anyhoo, I nicely called the lovely lady who runs the whole thing and she assured me that my account does very clearly state “no fruit”, a new guy is packing the boxes this week it seems. So hopefully next week all will be right again, because after all it is my money and I wouldn’t normally spend it on oranges and lemons!
But now that I have them (and they are organic after all) I must use them. So I am zesting all of them and freezing the zest, juicing them and freezing the juice and I will use these in future soups. The remaining de-juiced lemon husks will be used to give the bath and sinks a good scrub down, just to remind me of my youth (it’s great for getting rid of water marks).
Soup-wise, I have added another 10 lunchpots to the (quite decimated 
) collection I previously froze. I love having soup for lunch every day, it feels so healthy.
I still had a million gazillion old potatoes lounging around the kitchen so during LP’s nap I peeled them all and prepped some soups. And I googled celeriac, because I had never cooked with it before. And I found a very helpful site, Veg Box Recipes, which told me all about celeriac, including this gem:
Did you know…?
Celeriac is one of the most likely veg box veggies to end up in the compost bin…
I wandered around the interweb looking for a nice recipe, most seem to be “saute celeriac in butter, add milk and cream, garnish with double quadruple cream and a bit of cheese” or similar. And I am not a fan of white soups in general.
So I decided to broaden my search to include the butternut squash and I found this delicious Hallowe’en-y Pumpkin, Celeriac & Chilli Soup. There’s red lentils in it too. I used the squash in place of the pumpkin and we had no chillis so I threw in some curry powder instead. It was very yummy indeed and yielded 6 lunchpots!
With the remaining bits of squash and my plethora of potatoes I rustled up another soup, funnily enough this too came from a Hallowe’en blog post, an old favourite of mine, Curried Sweet Potato and Carrot Soup. Only I had no sweet potatoes and only frozen carrots. The recipe is here from back in 2007, the only change I made today was to the veg, I used 600g regular potatoes, 200g squash and 100g frozen carrots. And at the end I chopped up all the stray green leafy salad bits and celery that were hanging around in the fridge and chucked them in too before I pureed it, so it is full of goodness! This yielded 4 more lunchpots.
Littlepixie then went to work helping me pot up the soups, I’m sure you can imagine the mess
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I’m so sorry your veg box was a bit of a disappointment! Hopefully they will get everything sorted out. You can always send me the lemons, I eat tons of them because I like lemon in my tea!
We ♥ lemons here. Have a tree, in fact, that has 7 nearly ripe ones ready to pop! What about hummus? We put it in hummus (a weekly batch). I just made the lemon rosemary crumb cake from my blog. Like River, tea is a good choice (if you drink it – and I know you do). What about seasoning stir fries with it? Ok, I’ll stop now. Well done on using the celeriac. If the flavor is anything like celery, I’d have no part of it. I don’t citrus either (save lemon and lime), but its the texture not the taste that’s the problem (I’m a freak).
We eat a lot of celeriac as Turks. One real easy way to prep is to peel it until it’s smooth, and shred it along with carrots. You mix the two, and add some soy-yogurt, and a little mayo. and there you go! no cooking! you can add walnuts if you like. It serves a side dish, or a spread for sandwiches..
We are also lemon nuts. We go through about five a week in stir fries, dips, salad dressing, pasta salad, pesto, etc… I am also not fond of the texture of oranges etc but they do make lovely cakes.
@River, lemon in your tea, a very sophisticated lady indeed
@Jumbleberryjam, yes, I forgot about hummus, we make that every week too (but because I never have lemons, we use bottled juice, but now we can use fresh juice, yay!)
@Ayse, that sounds lovely, thank you for the suggestion!
@Cristy, you’ve all gotten me interested in becoming a lemon nut too, lots of ideas, thanks
Thank you so much for posting this! We get celeriac nearly every week in our organic fruit & veg basket, and I probably only use it one third of the time (bad, bad Stephanie). Now I have a new recipe to try, and it sounds very yummy!
I love celeriac – I just bought one yesterday! I use it in curry, in stew, to make mash if I fancy something a bit lighter than potato, and – of course – in soup! It’s nice because although it’s filling it isn’t as carb-heavy as potato so you don’t feel as though you need a lie-down after eating lots of it! But you do need to like celery to eat it!
we also consume about 8-9 lemons a week.EEvery morning we drink lemon-agave nectar combo in warm water.A good start to a day.
We cook celeriac in olive oil,I guess there is a recipe on my blog.Having said that a head of celeriac is sitting in my fridge for ages,LOL!
I’m liking the sound of what ayse said – sounds good, although I have never actually had Celeriac!
I know it’s too late now, seeing as you’ve juiced the citrus offenders, but you could have made Marmalade (if you like Marmalade that is!!).
You’d have got a big jar out of that lot.
Celeriac is wonderful roasted with just a little olive oil. It’s especially nice roasted with beets, sweet potatoes, and other root vegetables together.
[...] the old one in the fridge I decided to make some more of the celeriac and squash soup that I made last time. And I also decided that I would put whatever odds and ends were in my fridge into it, it could [...]