Annoying early March freeze

That freeze last night clobbered the cilantro--it doesn't look like this anymore!  I wonder if the roots survived?



I got carried away yesterday and made three recipes from The China Study Cookbook.  The first one, banana nut muffins, I still haven't tasted.   Here are the others.
The China Study Cookbook recipe#9
  Dominican Chapea

A chapea is a bean stew.  Wikipedia says: Cooked red beans or white beans with longaniza (Dominican sausage), rice, and green plantain are the basic ingredients, with cooked and mashed squash used as a thickener. The flavor is distinguished by the herb, cilantro, and a dash of sour orange juice (naranja agria).

By this description, the recipe was a fail--but it tasted so good!  It was brown beans with rice, butternut squash, cabbage and tomato paste.  While cooking I thought it was going to be bland--do the Dominicans not believe is spices?  But that was my fault.  I omitted the cilantro which would have given it a musty, pungent aftertaste.  Too much cilantro makes me nauseous, so I tend to leave it out or cut the quantity.  (My  love/hate attitude to cilantro is believed to be a genetic thing rather than a cultural one, so I'm not sure I'll ever develop a taste for it.)

The second dish was Couscous Salad.

Pretty, isn't it?  But I didn't like it much.  The dressing was too lemony!

However, since I failed totally at "fluffing the couscous with a fork", I had some big clumps of it in the salad.  Those clumps--undressed--were good!   I should eat this stuff as a breakfast cereal with a little honey or maple syrup!

And this also satisfies my food of the week--
Couscous is made from semolina, the coarse, purified wheat middlings of durum wheat.   Wheat middlings are the leftover products of making wheat into flour.  They (it?) have high energy content and are often used in pet food.  Durum wheat is just our typical modern wheat, bred for high protein content and low gluten.  So there is no reason to believe couscous is any better for you than any other product based on the human-engineered wheat plant.  So sad.  So yummy.


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