Adventures in our CSA – the e-scape from boring garlic

If I had to choose one thing it is actually possible for my dad to love more than my mother or us kids, it would be garlic.

My father adores garlic. He cherishes it. He has garlic magnets, garlic t-shirts, garlic cookbooks, and garlic chewing gum. He has attended garlic festivals (and yes, I have been dragged along). There is no way that we are in any way related to any vampires, because if we were, they would be dead from the fumes that radiate from our house in a half-mile radius come dinner time. When my twin brother and I were born, my dad, the son of a photographer and a photo hobbyist himself, posed our unresisting, swaddled infant bodies for portraits to send to the eagerly expectant crowd of family and friends who had been watching my poor, tiny mother swell to roughly double her size. And to break up the soft, off-white background (and to differentiate us, I’m guessing, because newborns all look kind of the same) he curled some pink ribbon and some blue ribbon and placed it next to us where a normal parent would perhaps place a stuffed animal. Only since my dad is not a normal parent, guess what he tied it to?

That’s right. A bunch of garlic.

My best friend — my poor, simple, and naive best friend, who eats dinner at our house maybe every other night — was once talking to me on the phone and discussing why she loved her mother’s cooking more than ours, even though she had said and done things that suggested otherwise like, say, eat at our house all the time. Finally, after I kept pushing her, she burst out, “You know, my family understands that you do not have to make everything with at least double the amount of suggested garlic!”

“Oh no,” I said, “you did not.”

But she did. And maybe she has a point.  Garlic is great, sure, but maybe, just maybe, the same way scallions and, to some extent, leeks can provide much-needed onion relief, it was time to get a garlic pinch-hitter. Give our poor, over-worked garlic chopper the night off. Enter our CSA.

The first week my mother and I drove up to Land’s Sake farm and started gathering our allotted bags of stuff, the one thing that we did not recognize on the list were “garlic scapes.” Obviously, the very name suggested inherent promise, but when you look at a giant, squiggly green thing, it’s hard to look at it and know what to do with it, let alone understand it’s full potential. But oh, what potential those squiggly green things do hold.

Now, boring people tend to do one thing with garlic scapes — make them into pesto. Seriously, google “garlic scapes” and the first page is recipe after recipe of how to make garlic scape pesto. Which, don’t get me wrong, is pretty good. My mom made some herself, and I officially endorse it as delicious. But to only use garlic scapes for pesto is severely underselling them.

Garlic scapes can be used anywhere you would use regular garlic, and using it as a replacement in an oft-used recipe is sort of like having a revelation. Garlic scapes are far more subtle and have less of a bite. And they can do what garlic can’t — be sauteed in big pieces that will be edible without potentially killing you.

That’s how I like my scapes — chopped, sauteed, and mixed in things. Lentils, pasta sauce, basically anything. My favorite use was in a giant batch of scrambled eggs with tarragon, dried basil, potatoes, and scallions. In fact, my best friend came over after dinner that night, and she spent about ten minutes gazing forlornly at my sister, who was eating leftovers. When my sister finally offered to let her have the rest, she scarfed them down in record speed and declared them amazing.

I consider my work here done.

Clacked by Julia Hass
on Jul 07, 2009 @ 10:00 EST5EDT