>> CELERIAC

I’ve not blogged for about a month, and so I’d hoped that I could start again with something that would grip people’s attention. However, given that I’m apparently suffering from writer’s block and chef’s block at the moment, I’ve not been cooking or writing anything much, so instead you get a post about cooking celeriac.

(If it’s any consolation, though, I’ve not just been sitting on my hands. I have been listening to some good music in that time.)

The best thing that you can do when you hit that kind of block is apparently to write, or to cook, but I’ve not really known where to start lately and so have instead been eating my way through a pot of porcini mushroom and white truffle pasta stuff that appeared at Christmas. Oh, and I ate some steak, too, and baked mushrooms, which I cook so often that they scarcely count as ‘cooking’ for me these days.

But as a result, celeriac marks something of a breakthrough, as it’s the first real food that I’ve attempted to cook in some time, so there is hope yet. It’s apparently the root of celery and looks like a heavy white ball – Larousse describes it as being “milder than celery and having a ‘firm’ rather than crisp texture.” I cooked Celeriac Julienne the other day, which goes like this:

Peel a celeriac and cut into thick strips. Blanch for three minutes in boiling salted water, then refresh in cold water and drain. Put the strips into a pan with a knob of butter and a little sugar, to taste. Cover and sweat for about 15 minutes. Use to garnish roast meats, fried meats and braised fish, such as cod.

It was good, actually. Tasted like roast parsnips, only slightly sweeter and with a texture that was a bit more like potato. It would be great on the side of a slab of meat.

Here’s hoping this heralds a new dawn of cooking and writing. Goodbye, writer’s block.