Green Sauce

I’ve documented my struggles with lettuce and have to admit fresh herbs often fall prey to similar ambitions. I’m much better at making croutons than I am at making herb butters so sometimes the soft herbs go sludgy before I act more responsibly and use them.

Fresh coriander and I have a special relationship though and when I see it start to yellow and know it’s on a bad path, like any good friend, I want to save it. So I started looking for ways to use up a big bunch of coriander. In most cases it was either a bit player in a much more complicated recipe or, even worse, a blink-and-you-miss-it walk on as garnish. Nothing I found was going to work partly because of my respect for la coriander but mostly because I had quite a bit to use up. I needed a recipe that would take it in bulk so I headed toward sauces.

Pretty quickly the likeliest candidates became chermoula or zhoug both in the same family as chimichurri, gremolata, salsa verde and pesto. All of which are just a bunch of yummy things blended together to add a huge punch of flavor to anything it touches.

I’m not a very fastidious cook, to be honest. “In the ballpark” is good enough for me most of the time. So as I was reading through all of these gorgeous recipes I just started writing down the things that sounded good to me and I knew I had in the kitchen. What I ended up with is incredible but it isn’t any of the things above. It’s a green sauce most like chermoula or zhoug probably but not exactly either.

Again I was reminded that the two things that will serve you best in your kitchen are curiosity and your tongue. If you’re looking to replicate something perfectly for some reason, go for it but I think it is so much more fun to throw things in a blender and see what happens. You might end up with something great.