I agree. Guess we’re just narrow-minded. 
Hey! I would absolutely try it in a second if it were in my house! Take that back! I’ve never been narrowminded about food.
Does it sound strange? Yes, of course. That’s why you used it for your thread title - to get our attention. Will I run out and buy the stuff to try the recipe? Prob’ly not. I can make brownies instead, and I know I like them. Would I try it if you handed me a piece or brought it to a potluck? Absolutely. My last sentance in my first post was: “Until you send me a pound for further testing!”
I just went out and bought evaporated milk, to make the fudge with. I love garlic and fudge, and the recipe made me so curious I have to try it. I’ll let folks know later this afternoon how it went.
I am about to do the same today. I have high hopes for this unusual concoction!
It may sound odd at first glance but a lot of things do. In reality, garlic and onions have a lot in common and it’s not unusual to see onions with sweet pairings, onion jam, onion & apple, onion & sweet sherry. The problem is that theres a lot of… I guess nose to fresh garlic which needs to be mellowed before it can be successfully paired.
Right now, I’m experimenting with coating parmesan crisps with a garlic candy type mixture to get just the right amount of crunch for a soup.
From my experimentations, it seems that the fat soluble aromas in garlic are more conducive to candy that the water soluble so my approach has become rather involved in the search for the perfect garlic. First involves a triple blanch in water. Dunk in boiling water for 2 mins, remove, dunk in ice water, prepare a new batch of boiling water, repeat.
The hearts are then taken out as I find they burn much easier and add bitterness to the final mix.
Then, involves a very, long and very slow braising in butter to try and extract as much flavour as possible without burning the garlic. an hour is not excessive, maybe about 4 hours is when you really hit diminishing returns. I don’t care for roasted garlic in this preperation as the flesh seems to still carry too much body for what I need. Unfortunate as that would be much, much easier.
The real problem I’m having now is to somehow get this fat and sugar into a candy type mix. Too much fat and the candy never hardens before the sugar burns. Too little and theres not enough oomph. Oh well, the experimentation continues.
I have a recipe for chocolate covered garlic cloves. You simmer the whole peeled cloves in a mixture of red wine and sugar with a tiny bit of lemon until they get soft. Let them cool then coat them with some melted semi-sweet chocolate. It is very similar to this recipe:
http://mulberrycreek.com/Detailed/506.html
Basically you either love it or you hate it. I love it.
Garlic fudge and raw turnip strips? Jeez, sounds like “Character-Building Day”.
It’s done. It’s yummy, although I think I let the garlic steep just a tad too long…it’s pretty garlicky, but I like it!
If someone is willing to try it, even a tiny piece, I don’t consider them narrow-minded. The raw turnip went faster than the green pepper, which I like much better. I don’t like the raw turnip, but some do. I had it around because my husband likes raw turnips for snacking on. At least one person had a second piece of the fudge.
Today we are having shrimp jambalaya, my very own recipe. Nothing unusual, but very spicy.
My batch is done too! I changed only two things. I made a bigger batch. The original recipe calls for 1 cup of evaporated milk, and the can is 12 oz., or 1-1/2 cups. So I increased the other items in the same proportion. I also let the garlic steep until about ten minutes before the fudge was done cooking. Hey, garlic is good!
Anyway, I think it’s great. It set up fine, firm but not hard. In color it’s exactly lick peanut butter fudge. Heh, heh, heh.
I think we need a separate fudge thread, to discuss all the varieties I’ve heard mentioned. I’ve purchased cashew butter before, I’ll bet if you used it in place of peanut butter it would make good fudge, especially with some chopped cashews added to the product.
lee, thanks for starting this thread! I needed something today to keep myself busy, as yesterday was grim.
Well, does it actually taste like garlic, and not sweet? Or what?
I mean, I can see some weird dessert recipes-my grandmother has one for mock apple crisp with zuchini, which is pretty damn good.
But, maybe just the idea of garlic and fudge together…you’re lucky, lee, that Loren is adventurous when it comes to food. My sister and I were incredibly picky as children-and Baby Sis still is. (To give you an example of how bad it got, for years, my sister refused to try whipped cream!)
:eek:
My mother made mock apple pie a few times, using crackers instead of fruit. It may have had apple juice in it. With enough cinnamon and sugar it’s edible, but apples are still better. I can understand the zucchini, though. In places where people garden, it shows up in everything when the season hits. If you don’t have your own neighbours bring it, or you might just find a big bag on your front porch when you go out in the morning. I’ve seen zucchini bread, cake, soup, stew, pickles, and I don’t know what all else.
And lee, the only way to eat turnip is raw!
It was sweet and very garlicky. I do think that blanching the garlic would be a good idea, but it is not bad as it is. It was one of the quickest setting fudges I ever made.
Loren is adventurous at least partly because I ate a wide variety of foods while pregnant and nursing. She smelled like hot wings at one point in her first month from me eating them and them coming through in my milk. She ate lemons and other strong flavored foods quite early. She likes to imitate us and we eat lots of different foods, and she never had premade baby food so she never came to expect foods to be just so. We made all her food up from scratch and started her with a variety of vegetables. We don’t tell her “you won’t like that,” but let her decided on her own. We praise her when she eats new things. When we give her spicy foods, we are prepared with bread or milk to cut the burn if need be, and once, (TMI) I shot her in the eye with breast milk because she rubbed her eyes while eating something with hot peppers in it. It seemed to instantly help her. I was quite glad we did not have company over at the time.
We have done our best to make eating new food fun for her. I have a lot of practice; I have spent the last 15 years getting hubby to be more adventurous.
Once when we were at my sister in law’s house, we decided to order Chinese. So she pulled out the pizza menu. “What’s that for?” I asked. “For the kids, of course!” she replied. “They can’t eat Chinese food!” Sorta confused me. What does she think Chinese kids eat? (Her kids were the pickiest eaters on earth. Gee, wonder why?)
WhyKid’s pretty adventurous, too. Our genetic problem is a very sensitive mucousal membrane: my lips and gums and tongue swell terribly from even a determined jalapeno pepper. So many spicy foods are just genuinely painful for us to eat, so I don’t push those too much. Everything else, though, has a three-bite rule: You must try three bites of anything new before deciding you don’t like it. The first bite, you mostly choke down to get it over with. The second bite is a bit slower, more consideration and testing can happen. By bite three, you’ve had enough experience to make an educated decision. If, at that point, you really don’t like it, you may make yourself a PB&J. (Note, make yourself a PB&J. Mom is not a short-order cook. Thankyouhaveaniceday.)
Also, if more than a week has gone by and the “icky food” shows up again, the three-bite rule is once again in effect. You never know when your taste buds are going to grow up and you’ll like something you didn’t before. This worked even better when he was younger. He’d even ask to try something again to find out if he was a “big boy with big boy tastes” yet! 
At first, the concept put me off, too. But there’s no inherent reason to associate fudge with chocolate or other sweet flavors, and if I thought of them as “garlic bars” or something of the sort, I probably wouldn’t have any trouble trying a few. After all, really, it’s no weirder than vinegar pie (which I’ve tried, but don’t even remember if I liked it).
Growing up, the only time Mom ever told us that “oh, you wouldn’t like that” was pecan pie. Many years later, I learned that the reason for that was to save more for her. There was always intense competition for it at Gramma’s house, between Mom and her siblings, and I think they all figured the less competition the better.
Of course, there were a number of cases of Mom saying that she didn’t like something. Neither her nor my father can fathom where I accquired my taste for curry.
Ooh, do you have a recipe?
Unfortunately I don’t.