The Stinking Rose - Garlic Season is here!

Driving home from the office last week I stopped by the local roadside market.  This is the best time of year for scoring homegrown produce and our local market is brimming with choices. But the one that always catches my eye is the GARLIC!

My family loves to eat garlic.  We incorporate garlic in everything possible and enjoy it cooked in many different ways.

Buzy Liz is the name of the local farm market and Liz prides herself on her vegetable farm and the bounty it produces - including the garlic.  Liz is always ready to help you start your own veggie patch and has a lot of helpful information; her Garlic Lovers Page is an array of information about garlic: how to grow, tend, harvest and eat.

So after chatting with Liz, I came home and surveyed our garlic patch.  I chose the driest strand and yanked it from the earth.

A lovely dirty garlic.

So what do you do with such a wonderful specimen?  This one ended up in a pasta dish. 

But our favourite is a grilled garlic whole.  We simply take the whole garlic and cut the top off (I use the top "caps" in salad dressings).  Then drizzle olive oil on the cut side of the garlic.  Invert the garlic on the oily side onto a small square of tin foil (if we BBQ I use two layers of foil).  Place the garlic on a cookie sheet in a 425F oven for 15 min or until garlic is golden and soft.

The garlic becomes a soft paste and is delicious warm or cold.  The trend at our dinner table is to smear the cloves onto potatoes, bread, vegetables - your choice.  The roasted garlic takes on a nutty and mellow version of its raw self.

In speaking to a friend whose in the midst of writing a cook book about baking, she tells me that the latest addition to her very comprehensive kitchen is a dehydrator.  What does she plan on dehydrating?  Well among other things, her first order of business is to create garlic powder.  I hope she can master it ... and when she does I will share it with you!

There's a story about the "Stinking Rose" - which is more like a family legend.  It takes us back to a wonderful restaurant in San Francisco called .... The Stinking Rose.  I will save it for another day.