another experiment gone awry . . .

i made cream of celery soup quite successfully a few weeks ago. i followed the cream of celery soup recipe in a vintage better homes and gardens cookbook, the only substitute being that i used 2T of dried hummus mix in lieu of 2T of flour to thicken it. it was very good and i decided that cream of celery would be my finish-the-celery recipe. it lends itself quite nicely to using every last bit of the stalks and leaves, even the inner yellow ones.

it's been a couple weeks since i bought this most-recent bunch of celery. i've used a bit here for soups and a bit there for chicken and tuna salads. at its crunchiest i even snacked on it with a bit of peanut butter. i've really come to love celery. for about five minutes i even considered trying to grow it, but i then read that it was rather labor intensive. hmmm. better to just pay 79 cents a bunch every couple of weeks; it's more cost-effective.

anyway, having been eaten down and to the point of slight softness, it was time to use my new finish-the-celery recipe. i essentially followed the same recipe, but i decided to try two new things. first, i decided to see if olive oil could substitute for the butter. it didn't render it awful, but it wasn't as creamy-wonderful as my first round had been. the second variation was in using some greek yogurt i'd picked up at the 99 cents only store instead of milk. i love greek yogurt. i especially love voskos and trader joe's greek yogurt. this was a different greek yogurt and it was not prepared the traditional way. it had gelatin in it. so, i decided that i would just toss it into a soup rather than eat it as i normally do: with a drizzle of honey. between the gelatin and whatever else they put into it, it did this weird curdling thing. it didn't hurt the taste, though.

the upshot was that i wasted nothing, yet i still tried a couple of new things within the framework of routine.

routine kind of gets a bum rap. i mean, we're bombarded with messages daily that something is "new," "improved," etc., etc., etc., and then we see our own humble routines as boring. but maybe it's not that boring. maybe routine can be restive, regenerating, restorative, etc., etc., etc. now wouldn't that be "new" and "improved."