Cutting Celery for Assault

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Elvis Hillard, and I'm here on behalf of Expert Village, and today we're going to be making a dish called a French Cassoulet. The next ingredient we're going to use is celery. A lot of times when you go to the grocery store, there are going to be a lot of dirt built up on it. Take it over here and rinse it. Just make sure you get off all the excess dirt. Before you clean it, just rinse off a little bit of it, and after you clean it you want to rinse off some more, because there's dirt inside of here. So basically what we're going to do is you're going to rip off a couple of these stalks. I'll probably use about three of them. What you want to do after that is take these leaves off. Working in restaurants all of my life, people have always told me these leaves are bitter, so go ahead and get rid of them. Cut off the whites; the very bottom. It kind of has a bitter, woody flavor. The easiest way for me to deal with this is just cut it in half; slice it into about three, and then you can just dice it up. I don't like celery too big, because it takes a little while for it to cook, and it gets really crunchy, so the smaller you cut it, the better it is. Like I said, you want to use about three. I'll go ahead and cut these down real quick. Once you do get these cut, and the zucchini and squash has cooked down so it's al dente, you can add your celery to it; which we're about to do in a moment. I'm just going to go ahead and take the whole cutting board over here and knock this down. You can really smell the zucchini and squash right now; it smells great. Go ahead and start stirring in that celery, just like you were with that zucchini and squash. Make sure that oil covers it all up. That's how it's going to be looking so far. You want to go ahead and continue to cook this for another four or five minutes with that celery in it."