I hate celery.

I used to hate celery. I've grown oddly fond of it in certain situations, say, trench-stuffed with peanut butter or tahini. Celery, however, is at its best - or at least most bearable - when bland and kind of tasteless. Under those circumstances, crisp, cold celery is almost refreshing. On the other hand, there's celery the rest of the time, in all it's green bitterness.

Not quite an onion, not quite, er, anything else, celery often has a bitter, overpowering flavor. It's crispiness, while appreciated by many for it's toothiness, to me conjures a raw onion. Something that hasn't been cooked properly. Fill a salad with little crescent slices of the vegetable, and what you wind up with at the end is a bowl full of hard little green boomerangs that never quite managed to stick to anything or wind up on your fork. Worse yet, when they do wind up on your fork, they fill your mouth with a bitterness that makes you feel like you're being poisoned. I imagine if I sprayed Raid on my salad instead of dressing, it would taste something like celery. And in it's stalk form, celery is famously annoying. Even full of delicious peanut butter, I'm often inclined to cut my little celery-boats into bite sized chunks with a steak-knife. Yeah, I would feel a little like Rainman, but in the end when I try to break a bite off and cut through those ropes with my teeth, I feel just as foolish.

I will allow that celery can add excellent dimension to the flavor of a dish, but only when properly cooked. I make an excellent Chinese dish that is essentially half chicken, half chopped celery, and nothing else. But the celery is small and soft, and the flavor is tamed by rice wine and brown sugar. The flavor of celery seed, however, can be more of a challenge, with it's potent bitterness. Yes, it's essential in some circumstances, like on a Chicago hot dog, but it's also easily overdone. I've had pasta salad prepared by some overenthusiastic cooks that are just drenched in celery seed, and those little buggers get stuck in your teeth, just like poppy seeds.

Celery seed is so potent, its extract makes a powerful flavoring in itself. Take, for example, Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray, the infamous celery-flavored soda. Oh, why didn't Fanta think of this one? Open the can and one whiff smells like one of those overbearing pasta salads. A sip offers a surprisingly less disgusting experience, somewhat like ginger ale poured into a glass that had been used to hold pasta salad. (In a recent office taste-test, most responses hovered around "weird.") Distinctly celery, though, and distinctly infused with the flavor of that little seed.