My second trial in the Great Cooking Experiment did not go well. I’ve learned two things due to this failure:
- I should trust my instincts even though I’m new at this. If it seems like it’s going badly, it probably is.
- The smell of fresh cilantro will make me sick. Unpleasantly so.
I haven’t included the enchilada recipe I got from the book Good Housing Keeping Light and Healthy because you do not want to make it, unless you’re particularly fond of bland food and are not allegeric to cilantro like some people I know. The recipe basically consisted of white beans, cilantro, vegetable stock, and various veggies (corn and a few other things I can’t remember) wrapped in a torilla and topped with salsa and cheese. Sounds good, no? That’s what I thought until I started making it.
The vegetables smelled and looked wonderful while I cooked them–no problem there. I started to doubt the recipe when I was preparing the beans. I used two cans of low-sodium cannellini beans as the recipe suggested and tasted a few before I blended them with vegetable stock. They were very, very bland. Although the vegetables I cooked looked very good, I was a bit worried since the beans were the main ingredient in this dish and I hoped that the vegetable stock would take care of the low-sodium flavorlessness. This is the point where my instincts said uh-oh.
Next came the cilantro. This is the point where my instincts said holy crap. I had never cooked with fresh cilantro before, and though I’m certain I’ve eaten cilantro before, I’m also fairly certain I’m somewhat allergic to it. When I began chopping it up, the smell made me sick to my stomach. Now, this was fresh cilantro; I had bought it that very day at my local food co-op, and it looked very good, so it’s not as though I had old cilantro. The smell was bothering me so much I decided to cut way back on the amount the recipe called for; I could tell already that the enchiladas were going to be bland so I didn’t want to completely forgo the cilantro and I figured that a small amount wouldn’t bother me so much. I was wrong.
Once I added the cilantro, I mixed the beans and veggies together, put the mix in torillas, and placed them in a baking dish that I had lined with fresh salsa my dad had made. I then topped them with salsa and a sprinkling of cheese and baked them for about twenty minutes.
These enchiladas looked deceivingly delicious. All I could taste was cilantro, and by the third bite, it was making me gag and I had to spit it out. Let’s just say, I was upset about this (not to mention sick to my stomach) since I had planned to eat the leftovers for lunch the rest of the week, but that certainly wasn’t happening. I threw them out and decided to trust my instincts from now on. And I returned that horrible Good Housekeeping cookbook to the library.
Just a side note, the Good Housekeeping cookbook was written by the Good Housekeeping Institute. Oh yeah, there’s an INSTITUTE.
Posted in Enchilada, Good Housekeeping Institute, Instincts, Regrets, Vomitorama
