What To Do With Too Much Cilantro

We let cilantro go to seed in our garden each year, so it comes up on its own year after year.  Which is a good thing for tacos or pico de gallo.  But when the cilantro becomes a jungle of cilantro, what do you do?

It's good!  The flavor is so powerful; the fragrance so pungent.  Some people don't like it and say it tastes like soap, but we like it!

I decided we'd try to find something else to do with cilantro besides the same old same olds.  We love basil pesto.  I wonder if you could make cilantro pesto?  Why, yes you can!  You'll need:

1/2 cup pecans,
2 cups cilantro
2 garlic cloves
1/2 cup olive oil
1 1/2 TBS lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/4 cayenne pepper

This takes all of about five minutes to pull together.  Mix it up for a bit in the food processor.  It has a nice bright green color to it and is very fragrant!

The wife got some angel hair pasta going and added the cilantro pesto to it.  Delicious!

She also cut some baguettes up into little slices and toasted them to make crostini.  We spooned some cilantro pesto on the warm crostini.  That's a nice little appetizer, I tell ya!

Although the official recipe didn't call for it, I think if you'd grate up some Parmesan cheese into the pesto, it would kick the cilantro pesto into overdrive.  We're going to try that next time.  I don't think it is possible to eat all the cilantro that is out there in the garden, but this recipe gives us another option.  Warm weather will cause the cilantro to bolt to seed.  That means more cilantro for next year!

A Key Question

A key question we always try to answer is: What are we gonna do with all this stuff?  The "stuff" always changes, but the question remains the same.  The stuff is all the produce coming out of the garden at the same time.  It is a fun puzzle to work out.  We often try new recipes.  Some work and some... well, we don't try again.

Right now, we have an over-abundance of cilantro.  It comes up volunteer every year in the garden, thicker than you can imagine.  We also have lots of tomatoes ripening.  Cilantro and tomatoes.  Hmmm...  That's a no-brainer.  I'll get Tricia to make some homemade guacamole.  Growing up, my mom always ate avocados.  I tried them as a kid and didn't like them.  It's funny how when you get older, things change.  My taste buds have changed and now I like avocadoes.  Mom was right.  Mom's always right.

Let's make some guacamole.  Gather your ingredients: cilantro, tomatoes, lime, tomatoes, avocadoes and some salt and pepper.

Chop everything up in a mixing bowl and squeeze your limes into the ingredients in your bowl.

Such a pretty concoction with vibrant greens and reds catching your eye and enticing aromas assaulting your olfactory nerves.

With a fork, mash and stir.  The vibrant colors will disappear and are replaced by a dull greenish color.  Don't let the dull color lull you to sleep or catch you off guard.  The flavor will wake you up.

Open a bag of tortilla chips.  We've discovered that we will kill the entire bag of chips and the whole batch of guacamole in one sitting.  Sometimes we have attempted to not eat the whole bag, but have determined that resistance is futile.

The "money" shot

If we could grow our own avocadoes and limes, why, we'd be eating guac every other day.  Chips are expensive!  It would throw our budget into upheaval.  We'll continue to enjoy as an occasional treat.  I'm also curious to try to make a pesto with cilantro instead of our normal basil.  As far as the tomatoes, we might be able to can some stewed tomatoes or salsa if we don't get hit with a freeze in the near future.  

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!

Fresh, Homemade Pico de Gallo

Pico de Gallo means "the beak of the rooster" in Spanish.  It does not contain the beaks of roosters.  I always wondered how it got that name.  After researching, there are a couple of theories - some say it is because you eat it with your thumb and index finger (like a rooster's beak).  But we always eat it with chips.  Some say it is because the serrano peppers look like a rooster's beak.  I don't know about that.  All I know is that it tastes great, and we can wipe out a bowl of it in no time flat.  That is quite a feat when I don't like raw tomatoes!

We have most everything fresh from the garden to make fresh, homemade pico de gallo right now, so we are eating plenty of it.  First, we have homegrown heirloom tomatoes in many different varieties and colors.  It makes for an interesting looking dish.  Then, we have just harvested onions and jalapenos.  We also have cilantro, but it is all store-bought right now as ours all bolted to seed.  A couple of limes are store-bought as well.

So here Tricia is assembling it.  We've chopped up jalapenos and have begun to core the tomatoes.  She's selected a molcajete to put the seeds and cuttings into and a talavera bowl that we'll serve the pico de gallo in.  Talavera is pottery that originated in Spain and was brought to Mexico.  A lot of it is made in Puebla, because of the fine clays needed to make it is found there.  There are six colors permitted: blue, yellow, black, green, orange and mauve and all those colors are from natural pigments.

It is a simple dish with few ingredients.  The flavors of everything mixed seem to really compliment each other.  We have chopped up tomatoes, jalapenos, cilantro, onions and are ready to add them all together.

Everything is mixed all together in the bowl and then salt and pepper is added.  Then the juice of two limes is squeezed on top and everything is mixed together.

The longer you let it sit in the fridge, the better it tastes, but we never let it sit for long.  We bust open a bag of chips and it is like magic.  We can make the whole bowl disappear!

I even like when we're at the bottom of the bowl.  I like to crumble up the chips and let them soak up the lime/tomato flavors and eat it up with a spoon.

Drying Herbs

This weekend we wanted to dry some herbs, specifically cilantro.  It comes up volunteer in the garden most years from previous year's crops.  We let some of the cilantro go to seed.  Where the seeds fall, the next year you'll have cilantro sprouting up.  The interesting thing is that the seeds of the cilantro plant are coriander.  Those small ball-looking seeds are used as a spice to cook with.  The plant itself is used to cook with pinto beans, in Mexican rice, in soups, on tacos, and my personal favorite - in scrambled eggs.

There's one problem with cilantro.  At the first sign of warm days, it bolts.  It will go to seed faster than Usain Bolt to the finish line.  In South Louisiana, it is a very short window to grow it.  Sometimes, before it bolts, we harvest it and freeze it in ice cube trays for use throughout the year.  Other times, like today, we'll harvest it and dry it in a food dehydrator on the herb setting.  First, we picked a bunch and washed it up real good.

We snip off all of the leaves for drying.  Usually for cooking, we don't do this.  There is lots of flavor in the stems as well.  For drying, we do cut most of the stems off.

We line the cilantro leaves on the trays of the dehydrator and turn it on.  When you cut up the stems and leaves, the unmistakable scent of cilantro fills the kitchen.  Drying them, however, doesn't really release the scent like I would have thought.  I began to read about this and learned that fresh cilantro is ALWAYS better than dried, because the rich, pungent flavor dissipates when heated or cooked.  Dried cilantro will do in a pinch, but fresh is always better.  I guess I knew this, but we'll dry some anyway for those times when fresh cilantro is not available in the garden.

In no time at all in a dehydrator, the cilantro is dried.  When we are sure the leaves are fully dried, we'll put them in a labeled ziploc bag and hang them for future use in cooking.  I'm interested in trying them out to see if dried cilantro retains some of the flavor that fresh-picked cilantro does.

In addition to mechanically drying in the food dehydrator, I notice that Tricia has a bundle of cilantro hanging to dry naturally on the back patio.  It won't be as fast as the dehydrator, but an experiment to see if we can get the same results with the sun.

Don't Get Perturbed About The Herbs

We cook with a lot of herbs. In order to have them in close proximity to the kitchen, we have them growing in terra cotta pots out on the back patio.  Right outside the french doors, we have oregano, parsley, and rosemary growing.  Most grow all year long.  Due to the quantity of plants and the size, our basil is located in the garden, so it is not as convenient.  Perhaps I'll grow a basil plant on the patio this spring for cooking purposes and leave the others in the garden for making pesto in large quantities like we frequently do.

Just this past weekend, I started a few pots of parsley, dill and cilantro seeds growing on the back patio.  Fresh parsley smells GREAT all cut up and we love to add bunches of it on top of a steaming bowl of gumbo.  When I was in the grocery store business, we would get some specialty mustard from a company called Inglehoffer.  They made different herbed mustards that came in little glass jars.  My favorite was a dill mustard and I'd like to make some of our own.  Another thing is recently I had a chicken sandwich with dill mayonnaise and although I loathe mayonnaise, it was pretty good.

Finally, cilantro.  We like it in pico de gallo and in Tricia's rice dishes.  Some people love it and some people hate it and say it tastes like soap and smells like stink bugs. This Article tells you why.  It is genetic.  It you hate it, chances are you have the OR6A2 gene that allows you to pick up the scent of aldehyde chemicals.  Those are found in both cilantro and soap.  I almost forgot mint!  We have mint growing out on the back patio as well.  Fresh mint hot tea is real good.

Parsley, Dill, Cilantro and Oregano (not as catchy as Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme)

Green Onions.  Now here is something that I can't get enough of.  I love to add a big, heaping handful on top of a big plate of red beans and rice and sausage.  So Good!  Although I planted a bunch of it from seed recently, they haven't germinated yet and we needed some for a recipe that Tricia was making.  Unfortunately, we had to run to the store and pick up a bunch of commercially grown green onions.

I usually cut the green onions all the way down to the roots and use the whole thing for cooking with, but here's the deal: if the green onions you purchased were in good shape (and why would you purchase them if they weren't), simply keep the roots wet and when you've snipped off the tops, plant them in your garden.  I just planted four of them yesterday as you can see below:

"Recycled" Green Onions

The green onions from the same purchased bunch that I put in the ground last week in the center below were already almost ready to be snipped and used to flavor delicious gumbos, soups, and rice and gravy.  

Grows in NO TIME!!

So while we patiently wait for our green onions planted from seed to grow, we'll have some 'recycled green onions' in inventory while we wait.  I'd like to try planting some other herbs this spring that we haven't used before - like fennel, sage, and thyme.  I also have some lemon balm that I'll get started in early spring.

Almost the end of the cilantro

We always grow a lot of cilantro in our garden.  Tricia is from South Texas and grew up cooking with the herb being used in lots of Tex Mex dishes like Pico de Gallo, pinto beans, Mexican rice, etc.  It is also a popular herb in Chinese and Indian dishes as well.  We planted it one time, let it go to seed and it self propagates.  Every year around the December - January time frame, lots of cilantro pops up volunteer in our garden.

There is one problem with cilantro.  It bolts.  It wants to flower and produce seeds.  The seeds from a cilantro plant are the spice, coriander.  Anyway, once it flowers, the flavor changes, so you want to harvest prior to the flowering stage.  The photograph below shows cilantro in full bolt.  The big vertical shoots are the stems from which the flowers will soon pop out on.  When the temperature hits 70 degrees, it wants to flower.


Bolting Cilantro

Here is a picture of the flowers of a cilantro plant.  The bees love them and they are pretty to look at, but they signal the end of the cilantro, unless you want to plant again so that your tomatoes and cilantro are ripening at the same time so that you can make pico de gallo!


Flowering Cilantro

So, Tricia and I brought the produce bucket out to the garden to salvage what we could of the cilantro.  We picked and cleaned a bucket full of the pungent smelling, but flavorful herb. 

Bucketful of cilantro

Tricia put it in a colander and washed it up.


Cleaned cilantro

She got out a gallon sized Ziploc freezer bag and heaped the cilantro into the bag.


Bagged Cilantro

And now it is ready to go into the freezer.  As she cooks beans or makes pico de gallo or other dishes that call for it, she'll simply go the the freezer, open the bag, pinch off what she needs, and in this way extend the cilantro harvest for a few more months.


Ready to freeze

Now the garden area that the cilantro was in can be used for something else in the Spring Garden.  Speaking of the Spring garden, we'll be talking more about that in the up-coming week.