Celery Root and Spring Onion Mash with Roasted Garlic

I've nothing against mashed potatoes -- I love them, just far, far too much. I cannot have a potato in my house without cooking it and consuming it (along with its siblings) with obscene quantities of cheese, butter or other dairy products. It's a fact that I can (and do) live with.

I needed something that would stand up (literally and taste-wise) to the jus and gravy from a pot roast (or a Thanksgiving turkey...), like mashed potatoes, but not BE mashed potatoes.  I saw a recipe for a spring onion mash but thought that wouldn't have the structure I needed.  I have been on a bit of a celery root tear and have seen many recipes and restaurant menu dishes over the years for celery root puree and celery root and potato puree. Boiled celery root has (approximately) 1/3 the calories and 1/3 the total carbohydrates of boiled potato (if that matters to you).

What if you cooked some spring onions down with a little salt and olive oil and mixed them with cooked celery root that you'd squeezed the bejesus out of to get rid of a lot of the juice and then mashed them together with roasted garlic?  Would it work? Would it taste good - delicious, even?

Hell, yes!

The first time I made them, I added some marscapone cheese and a tablespoon of butter and extended them with some mashed cannelini beans.  Yeah, you can do that and it's great, but last night I just stuck with the three basics: celery root, spring onions and roasted garlic.

Update: Leeks work too. 

Celery Root Stock

Whoa.

So I had two celery roots in my crisper and decided to cube and roast them up.  Celery root is the hairless cat of vegetables.  While a hairless cat may be a lovable, sweet kitteh, you kind of have to WANT to love it when you see it in its original form.  You can see a picture of it (celery root, a/k/a celeraic and not a hairless cat), pre-trimming here - thanks to H-bomb's Flickr pic. In fact the celeraic shown in this photo aren't as gnarly looking as some I've seen.

I trimmed and cubed them and was getting ready to dump the decidedly un-lovely trimmings in the compost bin when I thought, "Hey, would this make good stock?".  I heated up some olive oil in my 5-qt. Le Creuset, threw the trimmings in with a pinch of salt and caramelized them a bit. After a while I added a couple of quarts plus some extra of near-boiling water, brought it to a boil, turned it down to a simmer and popped the lid on.  That was about 2 hours ago.

I took it off heat at about 3.5 hours in, removed the schmutz and when it cooled down a little, strained it through a quadruple layer of cheesecloth (I scrubbed the celery root before trimming but there was still some dirt in the nooks and crannies - make sure there are no darker particulates in your stock).  I thought about reducing it but I like the delicate flavor.