Tuesday eating from your yard tip~ The garlic scape is the stem and seed head forming above the hardneck garlic plant. By cutting off the scape, the energy that was going into creating the seeds is directed back to creating the ultimate garlic bulb. Scapes even come with their own handle for easy gathering. The scape tastes like garlic, so it can be added to dishes you would normally use a garlic bulb. The first time I ate garlic scapes was on a visit to see my cousin Sherry Glass-Smith at the top of Wisconsin. One of the farmers market vendors had garlic scape pesto samples in order to entice folks to buy their garlic scapes~it was love at first taste! Then Pamela Cuttlers gifted me a jar of pickled garlic scapes and I was addicted. Last year I made bacon wrapped garlic scapes, tempura garlic scapes and cooked the seed heads with collard greens~all really yummy. Over the weekend, our local vegetarian cooking maven, Maggie Pleskac, posted she was sautéing kale and garlic scapes in a cast iron pan, which started all the garlic scape thoughts rolling. Inspired by Sharon Ohmberger’s chunky rose petal pesto from last week’s post, I added rose petals to the garlic scape pesto~beautiful and yummy!
Delayed gratification has never been my strength, so in the past I would stir fry the seed heads with the intention of adding them to my pasta, but they are super good and I ate them before they could be added to the pasta. With age I have learned to embraced this personality weakness, so this weekend instead of making them to add to something else I simply stir fried some seed heads and topped them off with Parmesan cheese and ate them directly ~ made me wish I had planted more garlic. It is well known that I am not a fan of soup, but if against better judgement you make soup in the summer, garlic scapes could be a nice garlicky addition. If you still have extra then try garlic scape-infused cooking wine or vinegar. How do you eat garlic scapes?
