6.27.2007

Cilantro for later

I planted cilantro for the first time this year. OK, I'll be honest, everything I planted was for the first time this year... I've never had an entire summer with my own place to grow stuff before. Anyway, I planted cilantro.

I read after it started growing that cilantro and coriander are the same plant- coriander is what the seeds of the cilantro (leaves & stems) are called. Well, I have a spice rack given to me a year ago with the coriander undisturbed- I don't use it! I was determined to use as much cilantro as possible to avoid getting coriander. Well, I did my best and the cilantro still bolted, or started to. I was determined to not lose the cilantro I still had (from my reading, when the cilantro bolts, the plant gets bitter.)

Anyway, I harvested the whole bunch at once. What was I going to do with all of it? I was really hoping to make some more salsa, with the tomatoes that aren't quite ripe yet. Through searching, I found how to freeze cilantro. With any luck, I will have "fresh" cilantro to use in salsa with the anticipated tomatoes. A note: I had read that the stems of cilantro taste the same as the leaves and, for my purposes, they'll be chopped up together and no one will notice... so I froze the stems and leaves.

Before:


After:


In the end, the few ice cubes don't look like much- I hope the effort will be worth it! It's an experiment, anyway.

3 comments:

Stephanie Appleton said...

I chopped mine up with olive oil and froze too. I haven't used any of it yet. My cilantro bolted this weekend! :( I'm going to plant some more so I have it for later this summer too!

Becca said...

If you think about it, that's about a tablespoon of fresh cilantro. That's a pretty good bit, recipe wise. I like the way the cubes turned out!

Anonymous said...

Excellent idea. I've lost more cilantro to bolting than I care to admit. The the point that I started buying this stuff I found in the produce section. It's basically fresh (?) cilantro in a tube. All the flavour of fresh, but preserved in oil. It works for me :)

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