garlic

Sometime in the mid-1990s, after a lifetime of servitude to the shriveled heads of garlic that I would bring home from the supermarket, I finally declared myself independent. As a cook and a garlic lover, I would no longer stand for garlic heads that contain 47 cloves each, cloves that I had to painstakingly peel one by one in order to get the itty bitty chunks of garlic inside.

Garlic is my favorite crop to grow. If you plant enough you can eat it every day. And out in the field there is never a dull moment.

I still have a lot of garlic from last year’s harvest. So, to make sure I get through it all before the new crop comes in I have increased my consumption. Thanks to this project I’ve been cooking garlic as if it’s a vegetable, rather than a spice.

Above, garlic cloves ready to plant. Photo by Ari LeVaux. Below, Toum, courtesy Charles Haynes, via Flickr Click here for the Word file: Time to Plant the Garlic Egg-free Aioli   The recipe for toum contains only garlic, salt, lemon juice and olive oil. It’s as thick and creamy as mayo,…

All across the Northern Hemisphere at about this time, garlic plants are reaching for the sun. Each clove planted last fall has divided and swollen into a bulb of cloves, while the flowers emerge in a circuitous path. Each flower sits on a stalk that, before it will stand up straight like a stalk is supposed to, spends a few days curling around like Cupid’s hair, before finally reversing course and uncurling, at which point the stalk straightens and the flower opens in a firework-like bloom.

Thick socks. Steaming soup. A warm spot by the heater. A crop of garlic in the ground. These are the stuff of wintertime cozy feelings. Like having meat in the freezer, or jars of peaches in the pantry. Garlic in the ground equals food security, long before it pokes above the ground. 

It’s fulfilling to kick back and simply know that you have done the work. Now it’s your garlic’s turn. In the ground, it’s biding its time patiently. In the kitchen, it’s warming you every day. 

Each spring it happens. You cut into a clove of garlic, only to find its lily white interior tainted by the green stripe of a developing shoot. A few weeks later, sprouts will emerge from the tips of every garlic clove in the house, turning entire bulbs into Medusa heads.  

During this period of garlic awakening, all cooks face a choice. Either dig out the little plant or cook with it undaunted, knowing the verdant imperfection tastes exactly like the bulb that hosts it.