FOR CORIANDER LOVERS ONLY

have you read the march issue of saveur magazine yet? it is not available in florence, so in november 2005 i finally decided to treat myself to a subscription. no need to tell you how excited i was when it finally showed up on my doorstep last week. the current issue focuses on ireland - looks like a tasty journey to take but not in the winter months - and near the end, what caught my eye was an article on trinidad called “calypso, sequins and spice”. the magazine arrived on a thursday and i read it from front to cover, including the "kitchen"section at the end where they wrote above an "herb" i had never heard of called culantro. the next day, my main man e. went to do some grocery shopping while i stayed home to work on recipe editing for a friend who is writing a cookbook. mr. e. came back with a gorgeous bunch of culantro (pictured above), something i had never seen before but had read about the day before in my shiny new saveur magazine. i had one smell of it and my entire body was immersed in the intense and bitter coriander/parsley scent of this cousin to cilantro. the curious coincidence is that mr. e. hadn’t even seen the saveur magazine arrive.............so in the evening we tried their recipe for chadon beni sauce (culantro sauce) reducing it by two thirds (we didn’t have 2 cups of culantro leaves!):

CHADON BENI SAUCE:
1 cup chopped culantro
1 1/2 chopped spring onions or scallions
1 stem habanero chili (we used one small indian green chili)
1 small clove garlic
blend all of the above in a food processor
season to taste with salt

we also added:
juice from 1/2 lime





then we grilled two 1/2 inch thick steaks and chomped them down with the chadon beni sauce. the next day, we made tomato salsa for some soft tacos we had for lunch. we added 1 rounded tablespoon of the sauce to the salsa and devoured our tacos. both meals were followed by the consumption of liqourice in the attempt to kill our garlic breath!