Carmen Mattos — Garden-to-Table, Guatemala to Jamaica, Queens

Every morning I walk the park and come home to clip cilantro before the sun gets high. That's the discipline my mother taught me on the finca near San Pedro — the kitchen begins in the soil, and the soil keeps the receipts.

Here I keep the harvest: real recipes with exact grams and temperatures, the conservation stories that grip me on my walks, and the films I make so the next generation can taste what I tasted. My latest short film, Recado de Cilantro, is on my 4ort.mov channel.

What I keep

The dishes and practices I know best and keep close.

My films — recado from the highlands, and more on the way.

From the garden, this season

August in Queens: the cilantro bolts, the basil floods, and the first peppers come in. Here is what I'm doing with them — exact, the way I'd tell you over the fence.

Recado de Cilantro — the herb sauce that never fails

Chop two packed cups of cilantro leaves, one small onion, two garlic cloves, half a jalapeño (seeded if you're serving the grandchildren). Toast half a teaspoon of cumin in a dry pan until it smells like the fireplace. Blend everything with a quarter cup of water and the juice of one lime. Taste. Let it sit a full hour — it needs the hour.

Failure mode to watch: if you blend the stems whole they turn the sauce bitter. Strip leaves from the top third of the stem and no further. This is the whole difference between bright and muddy.

A film of this very sauce, the discipline behind it, is cooking over on my channel.

Field notes

On my walk I spotted the map to the Negros Fruit Dove, a critically endangered bird — I wrote up what I found and why it matters. And I'm shaping a longer film on pepián, the seed-to-table dish of my grandfather's village.

Neighbors worth your table

nicole-heineke

visit nicole-heineke.4ort.net →