Celery is a versatile vegetable, which has green stalks and white bulbs.   Both varieties are very nutritious and can be prepared in various ways, either cooked or raw. The bulb is consumed most often in wintertime with other cooked vegetables.  Green celery stalks are added to salads, stuffed as an appetizer or cooked in small pieces to make a decorative vegetable accompaniment to a meal.

Celery is a very ancient vegetable and was highly respected in antiquity because of its virtues.  These virtues are especially interesting to us as we age.  Celery is known to be a diuretic as well as a stimulant and anti-rhumatismal food.  It is rich in potassium, good for lowering blood pressure, and is rich in fibers, vitamins and minerals, all essential for a healthy body.  Studies have shown that celery has various anti-cancer compounds as well.

In addition it is one of the vegetables that is very low in calories.

Always available in food shops, celery is convenient to have on hand in order to enrich your meals and enhance your health.

Grandma Nature

Rice is the second most consumed cereal, after wheat, worldwide and has been thus for hundreds and hundreds of years.  It is found in the diet of many civilizations.

There are hundreds of different varieties.  There is perfumed rice, long-grain rice, brown rice and red rice from the Camargue region of France.   Wild rice, however, is not a rice but a seed from a grass which grows in marshes in the Great Lakes district of the U.S.

The Spanish use rice in their national dish, paella; the Chinese eat bowls of rice with their delicious meat and fowl dishes; the Italians have their risotto; the Indians their curries; and rice is eaten as well with the Mexican meal chili con Carne.

What would we do without rice and its ease of cooking – steamed, boiled, baked?  Rice is also used in desserts as in a creamy rice pudding.

Its real asset, however, is the nutrition that it brings to the body.  It is not fattening and has no cholesterol.  It contains the vitamin B complex group, which is good for the nervous system, iron for the blood, magnesium and calcium so necessary for strong bones and teeth.   It has anti-cancer activity.  Of all grains and cereals it is the least likely to cause problems such as spastic colon.

Next time you are at the grocery store, pick up various kinds of rice and enjoy.

Grandma Nature