When the calendar flips from January to February, my cravings change like clockwork. Instead of bowls full of soft comfort, I want crisp, juicy things — fresh fruit, fat wedges of fennel, and salty slices of celery.
In fact, each year at about this time, celery goes from a ho-hum vegetable that I buy once in a while to something intriguing and almost sexy.
It’s not really a surprise. Grounding root vegetables and hearty winter greens that taste best cooked start to lose their appeal, and yet in the northeast, we still have a couple of months before young, tender green things appear.
All the while, celery is there, hanging out where it’s always been, like an old trusty striped shirt you forgot about, waiting to be re-discovered so it can refresh your routine.
From a biological standpoint, the craving for celery also makes sense. I’ve spent the last couple of months eating winter’s cozy-rich foods, which can make your liver work extra hard. Celery — along with bitter vegetables, including dandelion greens and radicchio — are believed to help support the liver. While the liver will naturally do its work of “detoxing”, I imagine a little help with its work can’t hurt.
One day last week, I sliced up some stalks from a celery heart and tossed them with lemon juice, olive oil, and salt.
Reading Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Italian Cooking many moons ago gave me the confidence to call something as straightforward as that a salad.
(Her salad chapter opens with some opinionated instructions about how to dress a salad — more oil than acid with just enough salt. Most of her recipes that follow consist of a seasonal vegetable tossed with olive oil and salt and either vinegar or lemon juice. That’s it.)
This week, I brought one more element into my little celery salad — a sweet-tart apple. The apple makes this even more appealing to my daughter, and I have to say, it’s wildly delicious with some curry-dusted chicken thighs.
For the curry powder, I’m not using anything fancy — just the stuff I get at the supermarket. These blends usually contain turmeric, which gives everything it touches a sunny glow as well as fenugreek, which has a maple-like flavor that I love with the apple. They also include a host of other warm spices that vary depending on the spice blender.
Lemon juice — in the salad and on the chicken — makes everything vibrate at a high frequency, which is precisely the type of energy I want to bring into February.
Cheers!
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to MISSION: DINNER to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.