While I certainly get a chance to cook for others now and then, I basically buy my food and cook for one---namely, me. If you are in my boat, I suspect you can certainly appreciate the frustrations of it all. You need ingredients for recipes "x", but you need only need, say, 2 tablespoons of something and basically can only buy it in bulk. To make it worse, the ingredient is perishable, so basically: use it or lose it.
That is precisely what happened to me. I have a simple and quick recipe for a Sante Fe Chicken Stew. The final ingredient is cilantro. A few tablespoons max, right? Do they sell it in small bunches? Oh, hell no. That would be too easy.
So what options do you have? If you want the stew, buy the cilantro and find something else to do with it before it goes back, right?
Enter Cilantro Salsa.
Secure 2 tablespoons of diced green chiles,
1 minced garlic clove, 1/4 cup of minced white onion, a dash of salsa habanero, 1/2 cup of lightly chopped cilantro, 3 tablespoons of canola oil, 1 tablespoon of lime juice and a tablespoon of sour cream. Schlop it all in a food processor, chop to smithereens, and you are done.
While it may not look like much (yes, it looks like something from a martian's cow), it was actually quite good. It was basically a weird combination of sweet and tart. Very peculiar. For whatever reason, it is just one of those things you can only eat a bit at a time. The recipe make 3/4 cup and that was plenty.
That is precisely what happened to me. I have a simple and quick recipe for a Sante Fe Chicken Stew. The final ingredient is cilantro. A few tablespoons max, right? Do they sell it in small bunches? Oh, hell no. That would be too easy.
So what options do you have? If you want the stew, buy the cilantro and find something else to do with it before it goes back, right?
Enter Cilantro Salsa.
Secure 2 tablespoons of diced green chiles,
1 minced garlic clove, 1/4 cup of minced white onion, a dash of salsa habanero, 1/2 cup of lightly chopped cilantro, 3 tablespoons of canola oil, 1 tablespoon of lime juice and a tablespoon of sour cream. Schlop it all in a food processor, chop to smithereens, and you are done.While it may not look like much (yes, it looks like something from a martian's cow), it was actually quite good. It was basically a weird combination of sweet and tart. Very peculiar. For whatever reason, it is just one of those things you can only eat a bit at a time. The recipe make 3/4 cup and that was plenty.
1 comment:
I use a big wag of fresh organic salsa in multiple recipes when I cook on weekends -- chili, burrito filling, etc. But, you can carefully dry leftovers in the microwave. Dried cilantro isn't as good as fresh, but at least it doesn't end up in the compost pile.
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