Fresh Foods Blog Hop #7 and What to Do with Celery Leaves

Welcome to the Fresh Food Blog Hop!

If you're CSA/farm share is like mine, you've been getting some seriously leafy celery. Not at all like the celery you're used to picking up at the supermarket. While we all know what to do with the celery hearts (ants on a log, anyone?) those leaves can be problematic for a lot of us.

So, some ideas for those celery leaves:

1. Dry the leaves and toss with some flaky Maldon salt to make celery salt
2. Use the more tender inner leaves in place of parsley in recipes (like I did here)
3. Make pesto
4. Make celery leaf simple syrup.

Sweet celery? Yes!

Combine 1 cup each: chopped celery leaves, water, and sugar in a medium sauce pan and bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring occasionally. Once the mixture comes to a boil, remove from heat and let it steep for about 30 minutes. Strain into a a pint jar using a fine-meshed strainer set over a wide-mouthed funnel (I have one that fits perfectly into my funnel--I love it). Store in the fridge. (Adapted from this Lovage Syrup recipe).

You can drink this with some seltzer (think Cel-Ray Tonic) or make a delicious cocktail with the syrup, some vodka, and some seltzer.

This week's picks: 

98% Local Chipotle Salsa from Frugal Foodie Mama

CSA Box Week 8 from Whole Natural Life

and Ingredient Spotlight: Summer Squash from Modern Alternative Kitchen

And now, time to blog hop! If you're new here, Kristy and I are pleased to have you. If you've been before, we're also pleased to have you. 

The Serious Business:
This blog hop is to encourage fresh food production, consumption, activism, and awareness.

Please feel free to link up:

• CSA collections;
• Farmer's market treasures;
• Home grown/raised hauls;
• Recipes that feature fresh fruits and veggies that are seasonal to your area or feature local, sustainably farmed meats, eggs, and dairy;
• DIY projects and tutorials for: gardening, storing and/or preserving fresh foods, composting market scraps, raising chickens in your back yard, etc
• Tips for local eating such as: tips for CSA members, how to find out what’s in season, how to make the most of your local produce, how to raise chickens, etc

Please make sure anything you link up is something that is currently available in your area from a local farmer or things from Whole Foods with the giant “Local” sign on top (or similar).

Please do not link up:

• Any highly processed recipes or foods (i.e. white flour, white sugar),
• Recipes that don’t include any seasonal, local produce, meats, dairy, or eggs.
• Recipes that feature produce that isn’t available locally and in season (e.g. mangoes and avocados in the Northeast, fresh tomatoes in winter, etc)
• Giveaways,
• Etsy shops,
• Advertisements,
• Posts only about specific diets and not focused on growing or eating fresh food

We don’t want to become the link police, and we want everyone to be able to participate; however, if you are in blatant violation of these rules, we will delete your link. 

You may link up to 3 posts in a given week that you haven't shared here before by using the linky tool at the bottom of this post. Make sure you are linking to a specific post and not to your blog’s home page.

If you don't have a blog but still want to participate or don't want to write a post specifically on something you'd like to share here, feel free to comment with any thoughts, ideas or suggestions. You can also participate via our flickr pool (link). Just send us an email @ freshfoodsbloghop (at) gmail (dot) com or request an invitation through the flickr group’s page. Deadlines for photo submissions is the Monday before the Wednesday post.

Feel free to click on any of the linked up posts and say hello (leave a comment) for your fellow fresh food communitarians!

Please include a simple text link back to this post (not the our blogs’ main pages) in the post(s) you link up. You may also want to add a button to your site:

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We want this blog hop to feature you as well as help each other come together to form a resource of good food ways for one another. In order to be featured on the weekly highlights, you must have a link back or button displayed in your post or on your blog. Again, we don’t want to be the “blog hop police”, but if you don’t link back we can’t feature you.


You can link up via Kristy's blog @ Gastronmonical Sovereignty, as well as find her on her facebook page, twitter account, or pinterest site. You can find me here or follow me on Pinterest, If you have any questions about the blog hop in general, please email us at freshfoodsbloghop (at) gmail (dot) com.