Misadventures in Food: Coriander

My mom is awesome - I am grateful to have been so lucky to end up with her as my mom. There is one thing my mom did not teach me growing up: how to cook. I am not betraying her by telling you this, she knows it (and all the amazing things she has done for me have more than made up for this oversight). So I have been trying to pick up this coking thing over the past couple of years. The English muffin pizzas and Costco frozen dinners I made in college are no longer cutting it.

Turns out cooking is pretty fun! However, like many things I attempt, stuff tends to go wrong the first time I try them out. In fact, they go wrong often enough that I hope to share them with you for your enjoyment and maybe you'll learn a thing or two with me:

Recently, I decided to try a new recipe this week for a Tahini Avocado Chickpea Salad from Ohsheglows.com (one of my favorite recipe blogs). The main part of this salad is the dressing, so I took a lot of care during it's preparation, even triple checking to make sure that I had done it right. I kept tasting it and thinking something was off, so I kept adding things to it to fix it. I just could not get it right, so I checked the recipe again and I hadn't forgot anything. I decided that I must just be tired of tahini since I had it in my lunch two days in a row (by the way, tahini is pureed sesame seeds if you didn't know - I had to look it up the first time I came across it). I was doubly disappointed because the recipe had avocado in it and I have yet to find a recipe I didn't like with avocado - this was devastating!

My solution was to bring it to my co-worker in hopes that she would enjoy it and it would just confirm that I had too much tahini for one week. She tried it and immediately realized something was missing, so we went on a quest to figure out what the problem was. We looked up the recipe again and went through it step by step only to find out I had done everything right. I started looking through the pictures posted of the process where I discovered that the coriander I used looked different than the blogger's which prompted me to asked this question to my co-worker: "Uhhhhh...soooooo...are you like supposed to...ummm...are you supposed to crush coriander when you use it?" I was relieved when she did not know the answer right away, so I wasn't a total idiot. After a few minutes of Internet research , it was confirmed that you cannot just throw whole coriander seeds in a food processor and expect it to come out delicious.

I encourage to try out the delicious salad, but only after you read the link about using coriander. :)

Misadventures in Food Scale: Worth a 2nd Try Due to Chef's Ignorance