This weekend I set to work cutting up some celery I’d gotten on sale at Aldi.  After washing it well (I needed a veggie brush to get the dirt out of the creases), I cut off the base of the stem, and the upper ends.

• The upper ends (the leafy portion) were tossed into a freezer bag to be added to for vegetable stock.
• Slim ends of the remaining stalks were cut into couple-inch lengths for snacking on.  (My oldest daughter is the only one who will eat these, so I didn’t bother with too many of them.)

• A few I sliced.  These went into a small freezer bag.

• Mostly, I cut the celery into chunks small enough to fit inside my chopper, and chopped them up.  (A food processor would be slightly faster, but I don’t have one.)  This all went into a large  freezer bag, which I stored flat.  When I need it for soup, etc., I will be able to just break off small chunks of the chopped celery.

• The base of the celery, we saved to use a couple days later (only because the schedule didn’t allow for using it immediately) to stamp roses onto wrapping paper/cards.

So there you go…there are all the ways I made use of an 89-cent stalk of celery.  (And, yes, organic would’ve been better.  But organic was a lot more than 89 cents.)