Cooking bibles & coriander

It was only recently, on June 29 in fact, that I was writing something about growing coriander. At the time I was berating myself for not having much faith in my ability to save coriander seeds and then raise new plants from them. Well, as it turns out, I was happily wrong once again, and all the coriander plants are doing well. 

Too well in fact. So now I have a bit too much coriander. Here's the pix to show my very minor predicament.

The larger pot of shop-bought coriander seedlings has been harvested a few times, and with follow-up liquid feeds, plentiful water and a very sunny Sydney winter, it has grown even more lushly. I don't really need much more ... but ... 

... the pots of baby seeds are rapidly turning into two more gluts of leafy coriander. It's not really a problem, but with too much coriander there is but one course of action ... turn to my beloved cooking Bible for a favourite recipe to use up large amounts of coriander in one delicious hit.

Here's my Asian cooking Bible. It's "The Complete Asian Cookbook" by Charmaine Solomon. Mine is an early paperback edition from 1978 (the original came out in 1976). Battered looking, but still in use all the time.

A HUGE thrill for me was back in 1996, when I was deputy editor of House & Garden magazine, and I went out to Charmaine Solomon's Sydney house to do a cooking and gardening story. Of course as a fan-boy I took my copy of her book with me, and she signed it for me. Wow, this kitcheny, gardeny boy was star-struck. 

Then Charmaine had some fun flicking through the book to see which recipes I had used the most. There are lots of turmeric-stained pages, but she found this one, all splattered with spice dust, with two of my favourite chicken dishes. Tandoori chicken (the dish I cooked for Pam on our first date back in early 1989 when she came around to my place for dinner) and Chicken and Yoghurt curry, easily my favourite mild chicken curry.

And so, to use up some of my excess quantity of fresh coriander leaves, Charmaine's books offers countless different delicious ways to do it — including that chicken and yoghurt curry, which uses up 1/2 cup fresh coriander leaves — but I have chosen instead her fresh coriander chutney (from spice-spattered page 88), a simple, dollop-on condiment that goes beautifully with so many dishes from the sub-continent. 

Fresh coriander chutney (Dhania Chatni)

1 cup firmly packed coriander leaves
6 spring onions (scallions or green onions) cut into smaller pieces
2 fresh green chillies
1 clove garlic
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon garam masala
1/3 cup lemon juice
2 tablespoons water

Make this in an electric blender. Put everything in a blender (you can cut down the chilli heat either by removing the seeds or limiting it to just one chilli). Blend it all to a smooth, green paste. Once made, put into a small bowl, cover and chill in the fridge until needed.

PS: you can make a “fresh mint chutney” by substituting mint for the coriander, or you could even use 50:50 coriander and mint for another variation.

Oh Me of little faith

After all these years pottering around our garden, you'd think I could trust myself to grow some coriander without it turning into a drawn-out saga. But the magic ingredient in this story is faith, or a complete lack of faith in myself, I'm sad to admit.

It all began with my being late to get any coriander going at all this year. In April or May, I usually sow some of the seeds I've saved from the previous year's crop, and pictured above, here's a nice close-up of them. The problem was that April and May in Sydney were unseasonably hot, and heat is not a good thing to have too much of when growing coriander in Sydney. It's a much better autumn/winter/spring crop. And so it wasn't until mid-June that I finally scolded myself with "Coriander, Jamie, what are you doing with coriander this year?".

This is where my complete lack of faith in myself kicked into overdrive. Sure, I sowed some seeds, in fact lots of seeds, but I knew that a very chilly June isn't anything like the right time to sow seeds. They should have come up in 10 to 12 days, but it was only after 18 days, this morning, that I spotted the first little coriander sprout rising up to greet the day (pictured above). Better late than never ...

However, by last week I had convinced myself that my saved seed was perhaps never going to come up. It was not so much panic as anxiety spiced with urgency that made me do it, so I went to the garden centre and bought a packet of Yates coriander seed and sowed them, too. They're in the pot in the foreground, and so far nothing has happened, but it's a bit early for them to show. 

I'm trying to mollycoddle them as much as possible, sitting them up in a sheltered spot under our covered pergola, on our outdoor table, in their own mini greenhouse. Nasty cold winter winds aren't going to hurt my babies.

The back of the Yates seed packet says the ideal time to sow coriander in Sydney is definitely not now. Spring (September) through to autumn (May) is recommended. But since when have I allowed a mere seed packet to run my life? I'm in charge here!

My coriander seed-saving and sowing routine has been humming along nicely for several years, and it's only because they were slow to come up in the colder weather that I foolishly didn't trust my own saved seeds this time round. When you consider how much coriander seed in a packet costs (you get hardly any seeds) this brown paper bag full of my saved seeds is probably a hundred bucks' worth. Untold riches ...

Worst of all, and I am saving the worst till last, I spotted a punnet of coriander in the garden centre where I bought the seeds, and though as a general rule transplanted seedlings of coriander don't last as long as plants left undisturbed in the pot where they first sprouted, I decided to get these as well. If you're a generous soul you might consider this to be sensible insurance, but I'm not feeling generous today I know it is pure faithlessness and nothing else.

The main reason I grow coriander is to have little handfuls of it on hand when cooking. When I am cooking a curry that requires a cup or two of chopped coriander leaves to go into the blender with all the onion, garlic and chillies etc, then I can buy a bunch of coriander from one of our many local Asian shops.

But when I don't really need a whole big bunch of coriander, and all I need is to snip off a handful to toss into a stir-fry or to use as a garnish, it's nice to be able to wander out into the garden to get some, rather than trudge up to the shops once more.

Should my lack of faith in myself prove to be a shameful episode, and all my sown seeds sprout and I have coriander pots galore  (well, three of them to be precise) then it all should last through winter and spring. Then, in the early summer when the weather warms up, they will all turn into spindly-leaved flowery plants that eventually produce masses of seeds that I harvest and dry.  

And so the cycle of the seasons and life goes on, but next year I plan to trust myself a little more ...

The 10-Year Rewind – Part 6 – Harvesting Coriander Seed

Every day this month I am looking back on the 10 years since I started this blog in June, 2008. Part 6 is this one — Harvesting Coriander Seed — from October 2009. It's my second "top rating" post of all-time, in terms of the number of people who have read it. 

As the weather warms up in our Aussie spring, coriander (or cilantro if you prefer that name) gets seriously seedy. This herb isn't really worth bothering to grow in our hot summers. But it is worth harvesting the seeds now, and that's what I've been doing this morning. However, I have also been tracing the plant's progress from leafy to flowery to seedy with my camera, and I thought I'd celebrate this quite beautiful little event.

Freshly harvested green coriander seeds. They smell nice but do look a bit like a insect-egg colony when clustered in a bowl like this.

Just a few weeks ago they were just a bunch of small but pretty flowers.

And a few weeks before that you could tell that the seed-making season had arrived. The broad leaves we use for cooking were giving way to the fine, spindly leaves of coriander that's about to go to seed. Once you see those skinny leaves, your coriander is on the way out.

When the whole plant is in flower it looks like a blowsy cottage garden perennial (or at least from a distance it does), and it still smells as nice as ever if you happen to brush past it while weeding or harvesting other vegies or herbs.

While the flowers, from a distance, look white, up close the buds have a stronger pinkish tinge.

Once opened the flowers blow about and flutter in the slightest breeze, as they're sitting atop stems of very fine foliage. The seeds form about two to three weeks after the flowers.

I'm keeping the seeds for two purposes. One is to use them for planting coriander next year. This year's crop was my best ever, and while it may simply have been kind weather, I'm not taking any chances. I want to grow this plant's babies. The rest of the dried seed will go into the kitchen, probably into something slow-cooked and either Greek or Moroccan.

The seeds themselves are almost translucent, but not quite.

I did a bit of Googling and it seems the tried and tested paper bag method of drying seed is good enough for quite a few people, so that's what I'm doing.

The brown paper bag hangs on a nail inside the shed, and hopefully the seeds will be dry in a few weeks, but I'm not in a hurry. The brown paper bag method worked well for the zinnia flower seeds I saved last autumn, so I can't see why it won't work for these coriander seeds too. Fingers crossed, though.

Planting time for my next batch of coriander is next year, in April or May, once the summer is well and truly over and the cooler weather of autumn has arrived. Autumn, winter and early spring are the coriander growing season here.

Coriander seeds update

It was only a month ago, on October 31, that I did a posting on harvesting coriander seed. In that short time the seed has dried, I've sown some to test if they're viable, and they've come up (well, some have). So that's my update, essentially, but along the way I discovered something about village life that I'll share with you at the end.

October 31, the vibrant, fresh green seeds, healthy bouncing babies in a bowl.

After three weeks in a brown paper bag hanging up in my shed, they're all dry.

After about two weeks in the bag they all looked dry enough, in fact, but I left them there for another week just to be sure.

The hardest part of the whole process was pulling the seeds off the stems and creating this pile of seeds. Took a while, that did.

Next step, the viability test. Six seeds sown, then covered in seed-raising mix.

Not sure if this constitutes three seeds up or two. Not exactly the best seed viability rate I've ever seen, but not a complete dud either. As I only need to grow a few plants at a time next autumn/winter season, I am sure to get more than enough seedlings out of that pile of seeds.

However, about two-thirds of that pile of seeds is headed for a jar in my kitchen. To turn the seeds into powder, I lightly heat up the seeds in a dry frying pan, just until you can smell the fragrance coming off the seeds, then I grind them up in a coffee grinder. I use the coriander powder in all sorts of spice mixes, but as I cook a lot of Indian food that's where most of it will go, although many Greek and Middle-Eastern dishes use coriander powder as well.

And what was this blinding insight I had into village life? Well, it happened during the long drudgery of separating the dried seeds from the stems. While doing this I imagined I was a poor villager somewhere, trying to scrape together a living, harvesting and sorting fifty kilos of coriander seeds, a pile five feet high. What drudgery! The only way to get through countless hours of this would be to share the workload with a couple of others, and make things interesting by talking village gossip!

"She did what, with Uncle Varna? No! Really?"

I am sure the only good thing about long hours of such drudgery would be the gossip.

Harvesting coriander seed

As the weather warms up in our Aussie spring, coriander (or cilantro if you prefer that name) gets seriously seedy. This herb isn't really worth bothering to grow in our hot summers. But it is worth harvesting the seeds now, and that's what I've been doing this morning. However, I have also been tracing the plant's progress from leafy to flowery to seedy with my camera, and I thought I'd celebrate this quite beautiful little event.

Freshly harvested green coriander seeds. They smell nice but do look a bit like a insect-egg colony when clustered in a bowl like this.

Just a few weeks ago they were just a bunch of small but pretty flowers.

And a few weeks before that you could tell that the seed-making season had arrived. The broad leaves we use for cooking were giving way to the fine, spindly leaves of coriander that's about to go to seed. Once you see those skinny leaves, your coriander is on the way out.

When the whole plant is in flower it looks like a blowsy cottage garden perennial (or at least from a distance it does), and it still smells as nice as ever if you happen to brush past it while weeding or harvesting other vegies or herbs.

While the flowers, from a distance, look white, up close the buds have a stronger pinkish tinge.

Once opened the flowers blow about and flutter in the slightest breeze, as they're sitting atop stems of very fine foliage. The seeds form about two to three weeks after the flowers.

I'm keeping the seeds for two purposes. One is to use them for planting coriander next year. This year's crop was my best ever, and while it may simply have been kind weather, I'm not taking any chances. I want to grow this plant's babies. The rest of the dried seed will go into the kitchen, probably into something slow-cooked and either Greek or Moroccan.

The seeds themselves are almost translucent, but not quite.

I did a bit of Googling and it seems the tried and tested paper bag method of drying seed is good enough for quite a few people, so that's what I'm doing.

The brown paper bag hangs on a nail inside the shed, and hopefully the seeds will be dry in a few weeks, but I'm not in a hurry. The brown paper bag method worked well for the zinnia flower seeds I saved last autumn, so I can't see why it won't work for these coriander seeds too. Fingers crossed, though.

Planting time for my next batch of coriander is next year, in April or May, once the summer is well and truly over and the cooler weather of autumn has arrived. Autumn, winter and early spring are the coriander growing season here.

Coriander, cilantro, Chinese parsley

A long time ago I was reading a US Tex-Mex cookbook and several recipes said to chop a bunch of the herb, cilantro, and toss it into the pot. Never heard of it, so I went searching for the equivalent. Mind you, this was in the dim, dark Days Before Google (remember them?). In fact it was the days before the Internet (gasp!) and so I went to a library. Good old libraries! I didn't find just the equivalent, I found the exact same herb, except that we here in Australia call it coriander while others know it by the name of Chinese parsley. It's Coriandrum sativum down at the botanic gardens, though.

Here's some growing happily in my wintry garden this afternoon. And that's the strange thing about this herb, which shows up so often in hot and fiery cuisines such as those from Thailand and Mexico. As a plant it hates summer and loves winter.

I never really need to grow much coriander here, as my part of Sydney has a big Vietnamese community and their little corner stores sell it for 80 cents a bunch. However, I do like to have some on hand when I need a little bit, not a whole bunch. The only time I can have coriander on hand like this is during our cooler months. I sow seed around May and the crop lasts nicely until the weather warms up in late October, usually. From November onwards, once our spring warms into our typically very warm to hot summer, it's useless to grow coriander in the garden. In a matter of two or three weeks plants go from leafy and useful to flowery and seedy with spindly leaves. It's what they call 'bolting' to seed. Hot weather does it every time. There are so-called 'slow-bolt' varieties available and I've tried them, and haven't found them any better. So I just grow my coriander from May to October. That's not so bad. I only grow heat-loving basil from September to April here, so I'm not complaining.

Coriander seed itself is a great culinary spice of course, but I find it easiest to buy a 250g bag of seed at one of the several Indian spice centres nearby, and then turn that into a powder as needed. (If you're really keen you should warm the seed in a dry frypan prior to crushing it to a powder. The warming of the seeds must get some kind of essential oils going inside the seed, as it does make a difference to the powder's flavour.) However, in the garden I just grow coriander for the fresh plant itself.

Coriander grows quite easily from seed, although I find germination rates can be a bit iffy, so I sow more seed than I need to. This year I had a better than average germination rate and couldn't fit all the plants into the garden bed (lack of space is my eternal enemy). And so a bit of the overflow went into this pot.

In pots or garden beds, coriander is easy enough to look after. Think of it like you would parsley or basil. Lots of sunshine, monthly liquid feeds, and pick some leaves regularly, even if you don't need them in the kitchen, just to keep the plants a bit more bushy and attractive.

In the kitchen there's one little point that I think is worth making, and it's this: you use every last part of the plant, not just the leaves. I like the stems best for their flavour, and many Asian recipes specifically ask for the plant's roots to be part of the curry paste mixture, as the roots have the strongest flavour of all. To use the stems I usually either chop them finely (about the size of snipped chives) and toss them in the pot or pan, or I just chop them and add them to the blender when making up some kind of curry paste.

Now, a coriander recipe to finish off! Which one? Too many to choose from, really. There's an Indian-style one by Sameen Rushdie which is called Lemon Coriander Chicken, and she uses coriander as a vegetable, adding 3-4 cups (yes, cups) of coriander leaves. Once cooked, the flavour changes from the one you might know as the fresh herb. With the lemon, it's a nice combination.

And there are countless lovely, delicate Vietnamese soups with fresh coriander leaves floating in them, added just before serving. However, with Vietnamese soups I often think of Principal Skinner from the Simpsons, who spent months as a prisoner in a cage on the Mekong during 'Nam being fed nothing but Vietnamese soup, and when he returned to the States he just couldn't get the flavour right. I'm the same (but without the P.O.W. experience). No matter how hard I try, I just can't get the flavour right. So, whenever I feel like a holiday up the Mekong I go for a walk and order a soup from one of the many local Vietnamese places. And so a recipe for Vietnamese soup would be an exercise in futility. I don't have a real one, despite all the books of Vietnamese recipes I own!

Instead, I'll provide one you might not have tried before. It's from my Asian food bible, 'The Complete Asian Cookbook', by Charmaine Solomon. It's for a fresh coriander chutney, a condiment to serve with rice and Indian curries. It's a "whizz all ingredients in a blender" kind of thing, a beautiful, fragrant, glistening green chutney you make on the day you use it, rather than one to keep for any time.

1 cup firmly packed chopped coriander leaves and stems (usually that works out as "one whole bunch, all of it, chopped")

6 spring onions, chopped

2 fresh green chillies, chopped (remove seeds to control the heat, if you like)

1 clove garlic, chopped

1 teaspoon chopped fresh ginger

1 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons sugar

1 teaspoon garam masala (powdered Indian spice blend)

1/3 cup fresh lemon juice

2 tablespoons water

If you're a glutton for punishment you could make it in a mortar and pestle, but an electric blender makes it so easy. You'll need to stop the machine and scrape down the sides once or twice, but it should all come out as a wet paste. It's a good idea to make it an hour or two in advance, then put it in its serving bowl, cover with cling film and chill a hour or so in the fridge prior to serving as a side dish with any curries you like, and rice. Dollop it out with a teaspoon.