Last spring, my roommate, our friend (the sous-chef), and I stuck a few cilantro plants in our herb garden. We’d barely harvested any of it before the weather turned hot and the cilantro started blooming. When cilantro is ready to bloom, it sends up stiff flower stems with sparse, frilly leaves that are nearly useless for cooking. And once it begins to blossom, the plant spends all its energy on the process, so you don’t get any new growth of the flavorful broader leaves and soft stems that make up the immature plants. The cilantro was the first of many casualties of last summer’s hot, dry weather.
But now it looks as if last year’s gone-to-seed plants set the stage for this year’s cilantro bumper crop! …[MORE]