Gremolata is an herb based condiment typically made with parsley, lemon zest and garlic. Its beauty lies in its simplicity – just three ingredients, chopped, minced and grated and tossed together. Each ingredient is bold so just a sprinkling really heightens the flavor of whatever you use it with.

I swapped out the parsley in favor of leaf celery (CSA’ers – this is in next weeks share!). If you aren’t familiar with leaf celery, it looks a lot like parsley but the celery taste is unmistakable. There are actually 3 different celery plants grown for different culinary uses – stalk celery, celery root and leaf celery. This website provides a lot of additional background and growing information.

You can use this with many different types of dishes. The original version was made to accompany osso buco, a braised veal shank, so I imagine this would pair well with many types of roasted meat dishes. For cheese lovers, I love the flavor of celery with blue cheese. You could pick up some Sequatchie Cove Creamery’s Bellamy Blue at the Main Street Farmers Market and serve it on crackers with a little of the gremolata sprinkled on top. This also goes well with starchy dishes as well, such as risotto or pizza. I originally made this as a garnish for a mushroom pizza and it was fantastic (pizza can be a fairly quick meal when you purchase prepared pizza dough from your local grocer or Niedlov’s Breadworks). Please experiment and let us know how you use it! Enjoy!

Leaf Celery Gremolata
makes about 2 tablespoons

Ingredients:

• 2 tablespoons freshly chopped leaf celery
• 1 teaspoon lemon zest
• 1 large garlic clove, minced

Directions:

• Mix all ingredients together until fully incorporated. Best used when freshly prepared.