Hallelujah Coriander Bean Sprouts

Living in DC is strange. DC is a square, split up into quadrants, with the capitol building at the center, and I’m five blocks diagonally northeast of the capital. As a result, most of the local restaurants and bars are capitol-adjacent. I’m writing this bellied up to a mostly-empty bar. To my left, a Congressional aide is loudly telling a lobbyist what his boss’s plan is for the health care bill.

That wasn’t really apropos of anything – I’m talkin’ about bean sprouts today.

I bought a piece of salmon for dinner, and I was looking for a side dish. I was thinking maybe pasta or rice – but honestly, I think blog already has two entries that are salmon + spice of the week + rice, so I decided to give it a miss. I had bought bean sprouts at the store that day, and bean sprouts don’t really last that long; in my head I put together coriander and salmon and bean sprouts, and the result was pleasing to my mind’s eye.

So I did what I always did – walked over to the altar, lit some incense, and prostrated myself before the icon of Google. “Oh great lord, I beseech thee – I wish to cook bean sprouts with coriander. Please, instruct me in how such a thing can be done.” I made unto It divers sacrifices – Power, as represented by three batteries, and Information, as represented by a photo I uploaded and then deleted.

I thought at first that my offerings displeased Google. Instead of recipes involving coriander, I got nothing but recipes involving cilantro! But what I have realized since is that Google, in its algorithmic wisdom, was giving me not a petty recipe I could use to feed myself for one meal, but instead knowledge – knowledge of the world around me, knowledge that would help me cook many meals, not only in this world but the one to come.

Google spake to me that night, and in gratitude I now pass along those words to you.

I. Hark well: In Indian cooking, Cilantro is known as Coriander, or Fresh Coriander – the Spice and the Herb have not different Names;
II. Look not for dishes that use Coriander and Bean Sprouts together; they all actually use Cilantro, or are Salads, or Both;
III. In Any Case, None of them are Side Dishes.

When the incense had burned down, I returned to the kitchen, where my wife looked strangely upon me. “Upon your face, a letter glows – the letter G! What does this mean, my husband?”

“I have been visited by Google, and the G is for Wisdom, my wife.”

“Wisdom does not start with a G, husband.”

“Aah, my sweet darling – but Gwisdom does.”

“I… honestly don’t know what to say to that. Truly, the wise can seem as total morons to, well, to just about everyone they meet. Oh, sorry, I mean the gwise. I think I’m just going to pretend you said that wisdom starts with a G in Greek, for my own sanity.

“But my husband – a great hunger is upon this household, and we know not how it shall be ended.”

And in their hunger, I made unto them a new dish. Hallelujah!

200 grams bean sprouts
1 carrot
1 onion
1 green bell pepper
1 clove garlic, minced
2 teaspoons sesame oil
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 big pinch of sea salt
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
1 handful of pine nuts

Peel the carrot, and cut it into thin pieces, about the same size as the bean sprouts. (I took a cleaver, cut the carrot into thirds, then took each third and cut it in half crosswise. At that point, I took a small veggie knife and cut each piece into strips lengthwise. The knife would bite into the grain of the carror, and I was able to easily slide the knife the whole way down. Here is what I got . (what I started with is to the right.)

Next, I cut the onion into similar sized strips, which was pretty straightforward. The pepper I decided to make easy – I took my cleaver, lopped off the top and bottom, and put them in a piece of Tupperware to use some other time. Now I just had the cylindrical center part, which was trivial to cut into strips.

I got a frying pan sizzling and tossed in the sesame oil. As soon as the oil had warmed up, I threw in the ground coriander, to get the flavor into the oil as much as possible. Once we’re up to frying temperature, in goes the garlic. Don’t give it time to get lonely - the onion, carrot, and pepper should go in about fifteen or twenty seconds later. Keep it moving – this would be a good dish to do in a wok. I didn’t, because there just didn’t seem to be enough stuff involved to be worth it – if I was doubling the size of the dish, I probably would have. The bean sprouts go in about a minute later, remember to keep everything moving, and finally the pine nuts and the coriander seeds. One more minute, the soy sauce and salt. There should be enough heat still in the pan that the soy sauce goes fwoosh when you put it in. At this point, the bean sprouts should be browning – give the whole thing a few good stirs to mix and combine, and get it onto a plate.

Sometimes, you just roll a twenty. I had spent fifteen minutes looking for a good recipe that involved both bean sprouts and coriander, but I kept running into the terminology problem. There is a high amount of correlation between using bean sprouts in your cuisine and referring to both the seed and leaf of the plant as coriander, it seems. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that – it seems pretty odd to me to call the seeds of the plant and the leaves by different names.) Finally, I just threw up my hands and decided to wing it. After all, I knew what I wanted to do – I was really just looking for a recipe to confirm that it wouldn’t taste awful. But really, it’s not science if you’re just looking to confirm your preconceptions…

I’m sorry I don’t know how much pine nut I used – I had a box sitting in the fridge from making pesto a while back, and I stumbled upon it while I was brainstorming. As for the sea salt, I passed a recipe along the way that used it, and it seemed like an easy way to kick in a bit of flavor. I probably should have tried the Kala Namak… but I have to admit, I’m really wary of accidentally ruining a dish with that strong sulfury smell.

This was a really delicious dish, and it went wonderfully with the salmon - I put together a honey coriander glaze that I found, of all places, on Martha Stewart's web site. I will definitely be making it again.

Tomorrow: Honey Coriander Salmon

Thursday: Martha Stewart Kicks My Ass For Ripping Her Off