The perils of socially distant online grocery orders: sometimes it’s not totally clear what the units of your selections are. Garlic was $0.01 each, so I figured hey, we go through a lot of garlic, and the homegrown stuff won’t be ready to harvest until July, so I ordered 8. I thought I would end up with 8 heads for $0.08, a real bargain, and it would last a few weeks.
I ended up with eight 16-oz. boxes of garlic.
Now I like garlic just as much as the next girl, probably more, but that’s a LOT of garlic. It seems to be nearing the end of its useful life, too. I just made a batch of slow-roasted mojo de ajo, and a batch of garlic confit is cooling on the stove right now, but what else can I do with it? If nothing else, I am limited at the moment by my olive oil supply.
I can freeze whole cloves and minced garlic, but what else is out there? I still have 7 lbs. left!
Thanks for that idea - we even have a dehydrator! (A friend had a spare and gave it to me. He’s kind of a pack rat.)
Presumably not - I ordered this morning and had everything in hand within a couple of hours! It’s organic, too. I can’t figure out why it’s so cheap - it must be nearing the end of its shelf life. That’s OK, we’ll figure something out.
Please, PLEASE, if you choose to dehydrate the garlic, set up the dehydrator in the garage, leaving as many doors open as possible!
Years and years (and YEARS) ago, my mother-in-law came across a bounty of onions and asked to use my dehydrator. I said, sure. She used my Oster Kitchen Center to slice through the many pounds, and set up the dehydrator in a back room off the kitchen.
My husband and I both woke up with hellacious migraines the next morning!
~VOW
When I dehydrated some excess hot chiles a year or so ago, I set up the dehydrator on the enclosed back porch with all the windows open. If it ever stops raining, weather permitting, maybe I’ll do it back there again. (I have all my tomato and pepper and eggplant seedlings back there, so if it’s too cold I can’t do it there.) Otherwise, maybe on the enclosed back stairwell behind the basement?
Do you have canola oil? Because Toum is to die for. It’s a Lebanese sauce/spread that goes well with almost anything you can imagine. Chicken, pizza, toast, beans, a hamburger, steak, pita, chips, etc.
Wrong time of year; at least, if in the northern hemisphere. You’ll get little bulbs if you spring plant them. You could plant them for greens; but on second thought I don’t recommend it, at least not if you might want to plant alliums there again any time in the next few years. There are some fairly nasty garlic diseases around; some can leave bulbs edible by humans even if they screw up the soil for later garlic crops, and garlic sold to be eaten, especially by basically anonymous sources, may be carrying viruses or nematodes. It won’t make you sick if so, but it can ruin all your future allium crops.
That price is weird even for garlic that’s starting to sprout. Is it starting to rot?
Roast them in the oven with some olive oil, salt and whatever fresh herbs you have on hand. You can of course eat them as is a snack or accompaniment, but I like to mash them with a little more olive oil and some salt to make a paste. Add it to dressings or butters, or spread on bread or wafers on top of some soft-ripened white mold cheese. Or to whatever dish you want to add some flavor enhancement.
MrsRico and I are equally curious. Hmm, I wonder if deer eat garlic? Would it reduce their reproduction rate? I recall an ancient cartoon of two teenage guys in a burger joint, the one at a wall payphone telling the fry cook, “Hold the onions; we’ve got dates!” Can a buck with garlic breath still get lucky?
Dried crushed garlic. Marinated garlic. Deep-fried garlic. Chocolate-coated garlic. Cream of garlic soup. Chicken garlic pizza. Garlic perfume for social distancing. So many uses! For more ideas, see the menu at The Stinking Rose. But don’t go unless you’re rather small - tables are jammed tight. They do provide some recipes like The 40-Clove Chicken. Serving that weekly should empty your garlic bin before long.
Oh, we know toum - Tom Scud lived in Lebanon for a few years. Good idea! But there is only so much toum even we can eat. We are definitely going to need to branch out quite a bit.
So far, we have done a batch of garlic confit, a batch of mojo de ajo, and minced 2 lbs. in the food processor, double-bagged them, and stuck them in the deep freeze downstairs. But we still have 5 lbs.!
I’ve never been much of a user of garlic powder, but we will probably try some of that, too.
