{"id":82,"date":"2012-08-16T10:38:57","date_gmt":"2012-08-16T16:38:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/therealfoodchronicles.com\/?page_id=82"},"modified":"2016-04-23T19:49:17","modified_gmt":"2016-04-24T01:49:17","slug":"garlic-strength-health-protection-and-flavor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stormysweitzer.com\/recipes\/garlic-strength-health-protection-and-flavor\/","title":{"rendered":"Garlic: strength, health, protection, and flavor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Garlic has long been my favorite vegetable. \u00a0I love it so much that, in college, I used to eat raw cloves.\u00a0 My roommate\u2019s mother, a Taiwanese\u00a0woman\u00a0who rarely spoke to me when she visited, made a point to call me out on it one day.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou eat garlic like Chinese Red Army.\u00a0 They\u2019re strong and healthy.\u00a0 Good girl.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think that was the most she ever said to me at one time, until a couple of years later when she asked when I was going to get married to the man I was seeing. \u00a0Fortunately for me, he loves garlic as much as I do, and we got married a couple years later.<\/p>\n

Garlic was also my ally and protector when I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Republic of Moldova, where it supposedly helped me ward off the Evil Eye<\/a>.\u00a0 Except the one time when it didn\u2019t, and one of my local colleagues removed it for me through a ritual involving spitting and hushed words I didn\u2019t understand.<\/p>\n

Today, garlic\u2019s role in my life seems much less romantic, and much more culinary.<\/p>\n

The intense flavor, pungent aroma, and even hot sensation\u00a0might be overwhelming to some, but I add it to nearly every savory dish I make \u2013 often in great quantities, often as the focal point of the dish.<\/p>\n

This is why I was excited to make it through the weeds in my neglected garden this month and realize that most of the shoots had dried and detached from the garlic I planted last fall.<\/p>\n

\"prybar\"<\/p>\n

I grabbed a rusty pry-bar I\u2019d found buried in the dirt and began to dig where I remembered nestling the cloves of the only annual that seems to grow well in my wind-swept yard.<\/p>\n

\"heirloom<\/p>\n

The 4 heirloom varieties of spicy, pungent garlic came up intact.\u00a0 Only one lone clove had spoiled.<\/p>\n

I will save a bulb of each type to plant again this fall.\u00a0 The rest will be eaten in a way that highlights them \u2013 not uses them as a background flavor.\u00a0 No.\u00a0 With their shades of rose and purple and their raw, fiery taste, these tiny bulbs were meant to shine.<\/p>\n

Over the next few weeks (home grown garlic tends to keep well for months at room temperature), here are a handful of the ways I will be using these bulbs:<\/p>\n