Cilantro Salad with Kalamata Olives, Avacado and Limes

Our cilantro plants last year went to seed (coriander seed, technically) and every single doggone one of them germinated.  We have a FIELD of cilantro!  We've made a bunch of salsa and pico de gallo with it and cooked it with scrambled eggs, and we'll continue to do that, but I was looking for something else to do to use up this excess cilantro.

I searched on the internet and found a recipe for Cilantro Salad with Kalamata Olives, Avocadoes, & Limes.  It is a middle-eastern dish and seemed interesting.  We made it up last night.  I'll share the recipe and give you my review.  Here is the credit for the recipe: SAVEUR

Ingredients

4 packed cups cilantro leaves, coarsely chopped

2 poblano chiles, stemmed seeded, and thinly sliced (2 cups)

2 cups red onion, quartered and thinly sliced 

1 medium lime, peel and pith removed, flesh quartered and thinly sliced

1/4 cups fresh lemon juice

1/3 cups extra-virgin olive oil

1 teaspoon kosher salt

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

10 pitted kalamata olives

1 firm ripe avocado, thinly sliced

Here is the peppers, red onion and lime all thinly sliced in a big bowl.

Then we added the cilantro leaves.  I just realized that we didn't coarsely chop the cilantro.  We did sit out in the garden and pick out all of the stems.  Coarsely chopping the leaves would probably enhance this dish.

We sliced the olives and avocado.  The peppers just north of the knife were some Anaheim peppers that Tricia didn't want in her salad, so I reserved them for mine.

Then we whisked the lemon juice, oil, salt, and pepper together for the dressing.

We tossed it all together, gently in the big bowl.

We garnished with kalamata olives and avocado slices.

And we served with Roasted Sweet Potato Soup with sweet potatoes that had just finished curing.  Delicious!

Review:  The salad was good.  The cilantro was a little over-powering (and we love cilantro).  I think in the future, we'll substitute half of the cilantro with lettuce to tone it down a bit.  The recipe makes A LOT!  We have a field of cilantro in the garden, so we have a lot more to go through!