P-C, that guy! With the tattoos! Who understands about Indian people getting grumpy about being called Pakistani! And who once chauffered another brown person from a different continent!

We figured he had to be mentally ill or on drugs. There is just no fathoming a sober man in possession of his full mental faculties behaving that way.

Yes, we don't call anything cilantro in the UK. It's just coriander, and coriander seeds.

I think it's going to take a while for my head to accept that cilantro is NOT a mysterious American thing.

For a long time, when I was little, I had this theory that "candy" referred to something specific. In fact (...possibly because it starts with 'ca') I sort of wanted it to refer to something like Caramac, which is a substance with the texture of chocolate and the taste of caramel.

I was bemused, and rather cheated, to discover it just meant sweets. It had this whole glamorous, exotic, American air to it. Candy.

Cilantro. It's just coriander. Huh.

tries to adjust thinking.

Now I'm wondering about why we use both words. Cilantro sounds Spanish, and it's used in lots of Mexican food, so I'm figuring that's where we got the word from, but why did we use it for only the plant and not the seed?

Well, the internet tells me that cilantro/coriander is also known as Chinese parsley, and that it was one of the first plants grown by the British colonists in the US, and that the word cilantro does in fact come from Spanish, but no information on why we kept both words.

I wonder if it's something as simple as English-speakers tending to use the seeds and Spanish-speakers using the leaves until fairly recently (within food cultures of the Americas, specifically)

Was I right about them both being called coriander in the UK? Here, we use it two ways -- grind up the seeds as a spice, and eat the plant as an herb -- and the seeds are called coriander, but the herb is cilantro. Both are coriander in the UK?

And in Australia. (To add the data point, I am not a supertaster and I can't stand coriander leaves.)

And to add to the confusion, there's also in Latin-American cooking, "culantro" (hard "c"), also known as Mexican coriander.

Crazymaking, I tell you.

y'all just made me hungry.

There are foods that I am indifferent to,( white rice, geoduck, cottage cheese, green peppers) and only a few foods I don't like -- tongue ( tried it once -- it was vietnamese style ), green olives , and twinkies ( they are not food, sp I don't know if they count. ) Plus I am a pepper wimp, but I love horseradish

Tonight at Mom's I found some decoupage jewelery that I made ages ago. They're not that bad. Mostly little wooden trinket boxes and wooden bracelets.

I'm headed to bed. Wish me sleep~ma!