What to do with the rest of a bunch of coriander
Coriander is the classic one. The recipe says a small handful to finish. The supermarket sells a bunch four times that size, and a week later it is a black liquid at the bottom of the salad drawer.
How long it actually keeps
A fortnight, if you treat it like flowers rather than like salad. Trim the stems, stand the bunch in a glass with an inch of water, put a bag loosely over the top and keep it in the fridge. Change the water when it clouds. Left in its packet it gives you three days.
Five things to do with the rest
Use the stalks, not just the leaves
The stalks carry more flavour than the leaves and hold up to heat. Chop them finely and put them in at the start with the onion; save the leaves for the end.
Blitz it into a sauce
Coriander, a green chilli, garlic, lime juice, salt and enough oil to move it. It keeps a week in the fridge and turns rice, eggs or a plain piece of fish into something.
Finish anything with it
Dal, soup, scrambled eggs, a jacket potato. A pinch of chopped coriander at the end reads as effort and costs nothing once the bunch is bought.
Freeze it in oil
Chop it, pack it into an ice cube tray, top with oil and freeze. Drop a cube into a hot pan later. It will not be fresh, but it will not be in the bin either.
Put it in a sandwich
Whole leaves, like a salad leaf rather than a herb. It goes particularly well with anything fatty — cheese, egg mayonnaise, cold roast chicken.
What not to do
Do not wash the whole bunch when you get home. Wet leaves rot fast, and washing what you are not about to eat is the quickest way to lose the lot.
The better fix is not buying it twice
All of the above is damage limitation. The actual problem is that the pack was bought for one meal and nothing else in the week was planned around it.
That is what MealPlans4One does. It puts the rest of the pack into other dinners and says so on the ingredient itself. From a real plan:
small handful Fresh coriander
Buy a bunch; you will use it in meals 5, 9 and 13.
Three dinners out of one bunch, decided before you got to the till. Nothing about the cooking changed — only the order the shopping was worked out in.
14 dinners for £19. First one free, on screen, before you decide.