Celebrate Celery

This Sunday morning, I was on cloud nine - no constant brawlings from my two boys who were at my mom's place and "let's go to the driving range/green" from my golf fanatic husband. Just me - home alone and lazying around.

I spent some time rehearsing my toastmaster project 9 speech which I promised my toastmaster club to deliver on the coming Thursday. Afterwhich, I planned on the menu for the week ahead. Aileen's restaurant as my elder boy referred to my home cooking, has been closed for the past two weeks. This was because we had just come back from Hong Kong and I was too tired to do grocery shopping after the return.

Life was slowly returning to normalcy. A few days ago, I resumed grocery shopping both at the wet market and the supermarket. It was at the supermarket that I bought a bunch of celery on an impulse. You see I have never bought celery since I returned to Singapore about 5 years ago. All except me in my family are carnivores. A trait that my two boys learn from their daddy who will meticulously sieve out any traces of green in the food. My two boys are worse, they would reject the whole plate of food if they see "green".

As a result, my cooking has been deprived of that refreshing taste of vegetables which I love. It is not efficient to cook for one person in the household. Then I saw that bunch of celery calling out to me at the supermarket. I heeded the call and picked it up without thought.

My mind turned to the bunch of celery. Before long, I have decided what to do with the celery - to stirfry them with Woh Hup's "steam fish with soybean" sauce. Initially bought to bake my fish fillets for my two children, the sauce turned out to be a tad spicy for them. But I loved the sauce. So I happily chopped more cloves of garlic and fried till the kitchen was filled with the pungent aroma. After saving the golden garlic excess for future use, I put in half packet of the sauce and stir fried for some moments before stirring in the chopped cubes of celery. I then scooped some of the celery, have a slice of bread to soak up the sauce and added some dried crispy cuttlefish to complete the taste.

The verdict - yummy! I will save the rest to serve with rice for the week ahead. Then I turned to read today's Lifestyle and chanced upon the article "Slices of sunshine" by Tan Hsueh Yun. Oh yes, it was her article some weeks ago about her obsession with celery and a simple recipe to share that planted the seed for me to cook dish. But no, I was not ready yet to plunge into baking....