Nutrition

Celery, much like cucumber, has a high water content. It’s also rich in minerals like potassium and calcium which are important for heart health as well as folate which helps the body to form healthy red blood cells.

Shopping Guide

You want fresh, firm stalks for your celery where they don’t feel or appear to be rubbery.

Storage

To store, wrap a bunch of celery tightly in tin foil and keep in the fridge for up to a month.

Preparation

Try a stick of raw celery with any of your favourite dips. Celery is  not only awesome with dips, but also great in lunchboxes and almost any salad. Try adding along to any spag bol or meatball sauce along with you tomatoes, carrots and onions.

Kids in the Kitchen

For a younger child, why not get them to set up an after-school snack platter with you by popping a dip or two in the middle of a large plate or tray and surrounding it with different cut raw vegetables including celery?

For an older child, it could be a great opportunity to teach some essential knife skills. Show them how to start with a bunch of celery, snap some stalks off, wash them, and then carefully slice using the claw technique into celery sticks or even to slice thinly to add with some onion and carrot to the base of a sauce or stew dish.

Find more ideas for involving kids in the kitchen here.

Sensory

Explore the crunchiness of celery through hearing by getting a few stalks of raw celery, and a few stalks that you have cooked until soft. Try biting the different celeries to hear the difference in crunchiness and softness (or snapping it near your ear if they aren’t ready to eat them). Which one is loud? Which is quiet? Which do you prefer?

Find more sensory ideas, tips and videos here. If you get stuck and need a little help with describing words, we have a selection for you here, too!

Serving

Next time you serve up some celery, see if your child wants to help you make a dip and plate it all up – can they arrange the celery around it so it looks like a sun?

Find the best ways of involving your own child and their skills and interests on our Roles for Kids page.

Activities

Why not try making a celery painting using a celery stick dipped in paint (or better yet, something edible like ketchup) to paint a paper plate or piece of paper with half circle shapes, or even use the stalk itself for celery ‘bark rubbing’ to make a fun tree picture?

Kids more interested in science? Try a colour-changing veg experiment with celery. Grab 3-5 stalks of celery from a bunch that still have the leaves attached at the top. Place each stalk into glasses or jars half-filled with water that has a different colour of food colouring in each one with the leaf-end pointing up out of the glass. Place in a sunny spot like a windowsill and check every few hours, leaving up to 3 days, jotting down a video or written log with your child to show how the water gets absorbed and the celery leaves change colour!

Find loads more free veg-themed crafts here, games here or fun at-home science with Stefan Gates here.