Wherein Mr Ullman attempts to remove the soap slander from the leafy green while Mr Broman panders to the "soapy" intelligentsia.
Cilantro is apparently unloved mostly. I got some with my last organic box and, as is my habit, searched the web to see how to use it. The first hit was an NYT story about how it tasted like soap. The next three hits made the same observation. A search of Recipe Cilantro wasn't much more of help. So I posted on facebook.
A friend had some suggestions. While I didn't use any of the specific recipes I did get enough clues to wing it. So this is what I did.
First, boil a good pasta. In this case I used large Orzo pasta, specificity ARHEON pasta from 100% pure semolina. It is tasty but its real charm is in its cooking instructions: “In plenty of salted and boiling water add pasta and stirring occasionally.
Boil it for 18 minutes, drain it and serve.” Be prepared to have to scrape a fair amount of it out of pan when it is time to clean up.
The next step is to toast some pine nuts. Cast iron is your friend here. Put the pine nuts in a skillet, nude, no oil. Set the burner to low, you are toasting and it real easy to burn them rather then toasting them.
Once the pine nuts are toasted add the following to the skillet in this order:
- Shrimp
- Finely chopped green onions
- Some snow peas
- Chopped cilantro.
- A chopped red radish.
- Garlic, smashed
- A bit of tomato
- The pasta.
Add a small amount of oil and saute briefly. Move the skillet to an unheated part of the stove and let it sit ,covered, for a couple of minutes. Add a couple of squirts of lemon juice, mix and let sit for for another minute.
Serve with a good bread
This is one of those recipes that is quite tasty but not quite good enough. Should any of my readers (including the two spam bots from the EU) improve on it please let me know.
P.S. I haven't a clue what is up with the "Add a small amount of oil and saute briefly" section. Tried to fix it twice and it didn't fix. Odd.
P.S. I haven't a clue what is up with the "Add a small amount of oil and saute briefly" section. Tried to fix it twice and it didn't fix. Odd.
Rutabaga is kind of like that, too. Some people think it tastes like soap. And Ben read somewhere that rutabaga tastes extremely bitter to some people. Mike Elliott, however, is a huge fan of both cilantro and rutabaga. Nice blog, by the way.
ReplyDeleteTanya