THE CHINESE HERB GARDEN - Growing Chinese Vegetables in Your Own Backyard - page 139

• Fill hard-boiled egg halves with a mix of yolks blended with a little sesame oil
and minced cilantro.
IN COOKED DISHES . Add cilantro toward the end of the cooking cycle.
• The Chinese make a particularly delectable beef stew, simmered with vegetables
and seasoned with five spice powder and cilantro.
• Add cilantro to lamb stew during the last 20 minutes of cooking.
SEEDS . The flavor of the seeds is spicy citrus-orange with a touch of hot lime. The
ground seeds are commonly used to flavor breads, puddings, and pastries, but don't
limit your use of the seeds to sweet dishes. They are one of the spices most widely
used in Indian curries, and their unique flavor is highly regarded in all Indian cookery.
• Incorporate in a vanilla blancmange with a thin orange slice or a garnish of
minced orange mint.
• In Scandinavian countries, the seeds are often crushed and mixed with flour to
make special breads. This custom may have found its way north from ancient
Greece, where the seeds were ground up along with the flour for bread dough.
• Simmer crushed seeds in chicken broth for 2 or 3 minutes. Strain the broth and
use to cook rice pilaf. If serving this with a chicken curry, chop up 2 or 3 or-
anges and a lemon and cook them along with the rice, stirring when the rice is
half done to mix the fruit evenly throughout.
Mitsuba
S AN Y E , S AN I P
Cryptotaenia canadensis ssp. japonica
(color photo, page xiv)
I have often thought it would be fun to plant a corner of an herb garden with all the
different parsleys. I would have Italian or flat-leaved parsley, curly parsley, Hamburg
parsley, cilantro (Chinese parsley), and mitsuba (Japanese parsley). The last two aren't
really parsley, but I would stretch the point for the sake of an interesting garden.