Tuesday eating from your yard tip~We are nearing the joyous day of my birth, which in non-pandemic years would be celebrated with our annual Garlic Nosh Pot Luck Gathering. You might find it surprising that the most popular garlic creations tend to be the sweets. The most Garlic Nosh wins have gone to Sharon T. Ohmberger’s gluten free chocolate chip cookies. Jenny Carver whipped up some fabulous garlic ice cream and Deb Hegemann made chocolate garlic cake. David Rabe dipped garlic cloves in chocolate and someone else took it up notch with the garlic cloves and caramel dipped in chocolate then sprinkled with sea salt. Here is the deal~while raw chopped or chewed up garlic has more medicinal properties, when you cook garlic long enough it becomes sweet. A whole garlic bulb baked at 325 degree Fahrenheit for 45 minutes with a little olive oil and bouillon becomes a heavenly buttery spread. It is difficult for me to think of many things that are not made more lovely with garlic. Garlic is a staple in well most countries cooking creating lovely pasta dishes, pesto, baba ganoush, hummus, and roast beast etc etc. Sheila M. Krueger throws a garlic clove in the water when she is boiling potatoes for mashing. From my college days in Chicago, my boyfriend’s favorite pizza was topped with a multitude of garlic cloves~few things better! I have never mastered canning, but thankfully my friends Alison Krohn and Pamela Cuttlers, have shared their pickled garlic cloves with me. Pam Cutler also made the most amazing black garlic by putting garlic on a bed of pine needles in a slow cooker on low for like three weeks. Some she shared with us at Garlic Nosh and some she ground into black garlic powder.
We can’t have eating from your yard without a drink. Rick and Kaye Amend brought a giant Erlenmeyer flask of garlicky Bloody Mary to one Garlic Nosh. I made garlic infused vodka, which I pulled out at each Garlic Nosh and put the jar back in the refrigerator each year until we moved and I threw it out. It wasn’t very good, but it was a conversation starter.
If you are looking at a glorious glut of tomatoes, garlic, onions, basil and worried they will rot before you can eat it all, just chop them up and bake them in the oven until they cook down into a smooth sauce. When it cools throw it in the freezer.
My mean grandma ate garlic for its medicinal properties everyday until she finally died at 97. Alex Svoboda, a local herbalist, has long said we need to make garlic breath cool. I told her 2020, and now it seems 2021, is garlic’s time to shine with social distancing and mask wearing. Garlic has long been celebrated for its many medicinal and culinary attributes. Most notably garlic was one of the ingredients in the legendary thieves vinegar. The story goes that during the black plague four thieves robbed those stricken by the plague, but mysteriously never got ill. When they were finally caught, the judge made a deal with them that if they shared their secret they would be killed by a less horrible means.
I will leave you with one more garlic tidbit to ponder~garlic is thought to be an aphrodisiac. How do you eat garlic?
