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The celery scrap that I put in water next to my leeks did not spring to life as fast and dramatically as to leeks did on day one, however it is day two now and it is starting to show some life.
People I used to know many years ago were insistent that celery leaves were poisonous and should not be eaten and especially not cooked and eaten, or even wilted. They also said not to wear white shoes before Easter. See how far that got them.
This may not Stamp Out Hunger but it's a revelation to me.
I have been boning up on prebiotics. Apparently lots of people are getting enough probiotics but not benefitting from them because, guess what, probiotics need to eat. If we are into fermented foods we make them, but then we have to feed them.
Homemade sauerkraut is special because cabbage contains the prebiotic inulin and so does celery, which I also put in my kraut. Inulin is a prepiotic that nourishes the probiotics which nourish us.
When I learned that leeks are a rich source of inulin I decided to try to tip the love/hate relationship I had with leeks more to the love side. What is there to hate about a leek you might well ask?
The way I used to look at leeks was that although they are delicious, they take up a lot of room, require a lot of cleaning, and create a lot of waste. In the past, too, they were pretty hard to find in the supermarket at a reasonable price. But now I'm starting to see them affordable in a lot of markets and many bloggers are now posting wonderful photos of how they regrew leeks from supermarket scraps to harvestable plants with minimal effort. I still hesitated though because leeks like so many of my favorite veggies or cold weather crops I'm not only do I live in a more then warm, super hot climate, but I am nomadic and don't always have access to dirt.
I wanted to find a heat tolerant plant rich in inulin that would taste good in my kraut and grow fast with minimal effort in water indoors. Even when it began to sink in that leeks were my solution, I held back, thinking that even if I could regrow them fast enough to keep up with my demand, the new growth might be too tough or not tasty enough.
But here you have it. I can grow 2" of tender delicious leek stalk per plant in water on a window sill in 3 days. That is a couple feet of stalk up to 1" diameter in a week. Its love.
But there is more.
Not only does the scrap from the bottom of a leek regenerate, but it regrows from the leaf end too, in both directions.