Homemade Celery Salt and a Pyrex Scare

Heidi from 101 Cookbooks recently posted a recipe on how to make homemade celery salt, and it certainly intrigued me. While celery salt is not a spice that I tend to reach for on a regular or even semi regular basis, I thought that it could become part of my repitoire, specifically on my morning eggs. The trouble with the recipe though, was finding celery that still had leaves intact.





Fortunately for me, Allandale Farm had homegrown celery at their farmer's market stand in Roslindale last weekend-I was in luck! Later that week I finally had a chance to make the spice, and it sure was easy! All that was involved was chopping the leaves off of the celery stalk, and then spreading the leaves on baking sheet and baking for 5 minutes. Lastly, the leaves need to be crumbled and then an equal amount of salt should be added to the dried celery leaves, which then completes the spice. After a quick shake together, you have a homemade spice!



I have used the celery salt on scrambled eggs, salad, and bread. I definitely have a new appreciation for celery salt, and will be trying to make other spices soon.





On a totally separate note, I wanted to talk about a terrible and scary experience that I had this morning while making bread. I was trying out a recipe from my new book, "Aritsan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day," which asked that you put water into a dish that was sitting in an already preheated oven. The book did mention to use the broiler pan, however, I do not have one, so I used a Pyrex dish. When I started pouring the water into the already hot dish, the dish exploded in the oven! Fortunately, no one was hurt, and the bread was still intact, but I now will not be using Pyrex in the future.

Apparently, after I conducted some research, I found that Pyrex cannot be subjected to extreme temperature changes, or else it will explode. This began occurring when the company was sold, and the manufacturing of the products was outsourced. The manufacturer switched to a cheaper raw material, which is when all of the instances of exploding Pyrex dishes started to occur.

I wanted to tell everyone this so that extra care and precaution is taken when using Pyrex dishes. I hope this does not happen to you!