Sunday, June 04, 2006

HERBS 101 - CILANTRO

FRESH CILANTRO, ALSO MAY BE REFERRED TO AS CORIANDER
In the fajita chicken recipe, posted below, it calls for cilantro. Now I know some people (wink, wink ;D) while at the supermarket may have trouble asking, say, a nearby old lady about which herb to buy. After minutes of debating whether or not to ask her, you decide against it out of fear that she would think you were too cute and would want to engage in conversation with you. You go home empty handed, and now have to live with the fact that you just prohibited your chicken fajita meat from living up to its full potential. Not that I know of anyone that this has happened to, but to prevent future "situations" such as this, I present to you- Herbs 101.

Cilantro is an herb that grows from the coriander seed and may be refered to as Chinese parsley or coriander (I know, in Germany, that is what they label it as). Don't mistake it with flat leaf parsley, the two look very similar. If you should get confused, smell it. It will be very fragrent with kind of a lemon-limey undertone. If the scent seems familiar to you, its probably because you've had it in in salsa or another Mexican dish. Cilantro is also used widely in Thai cuisine, and I often used to see it in Indian curry (I miss you Bombay...).
To use cilantro, simply remove the leaves from the stem (the thin pieces of stem are okay, but you don't want to use the thicker stems) and chop with a knife. You don't want to chop herbs way in advance, because they tend to turn brown.

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