GARLIC!

I love garlic!

I love garlic almost as much as I love chocolate or nutella,
or fresh crusty bread, or my Mom's artichoke omelettes.

I said almost.

Loving garlic more than chocolate, well that's just crazy talk.

But I do love it. In fact I love garlic so much that when John and I were first starting off in our relationship,
one of the first food related questions I asked him was "do you like garlic?".

Luckily his answer was yes, cause if it was no,

I'm not quite sure what I would have done.

A life that would hamper my love of garlic? I can't imagine it. I guess I was pretty lucky he was a garlic lover.

This year I ordered a garlic sampler from Gourmet Garlic Gardens. I found them through a fantastic gardening blog called Chiots Run.

I choose the medium flavor assortment. Here's what I got:

Persian Star - This smelled so good I wanted to chop up a clove and start cooking immediately.

Music - the biggest and baddest of them all. The cloves were huge!

Chesnok Red - this was so pretty it was kinda of a shame to cover it up with dirt.



Purple Italian Rocambole - hey it's Italian, so it's gotta be good.



The folks at Gourmet Garlic Gardens really know their stuff.

They mail you the garlic when it's time to plant it in your area.

You get 2 pages of instructions - 1 to explain how to plant the garlic, and 1 that explains how to harvest when it's time.

First the garlic gets a soak overnite in a baking soda/water mixture.

This looses up the skins.

Then you soak them for 3 - 5 minutes in rubbing alcohol

right before they go in the ground.

The alcohol kills pests and any eggs or pathogens the first soaking missed. Then you are ready to plant.

Here in RI I was instructed to plant the cloves 4 inches deep and 6 inches apart.

Mitch was my garlic planting helper for the day.

I told him that I would be sure to let all my blog readers know that

the hands you see here are Mitchells.

Please not how soft and subtle they look and how perfectly manicured they are. Mine were caked with dirt. I'm just sayin'.

Once all those little cloves of goodness were in the ground,

we mulched them with leaves and grass clipping,

which gave Mr. Softy Hands the sniffles (sorry Mitchyboy!).

The only bad part of growing your own garlic....the waiting!

These beauties will be harvested from June till early Fall.

That leaves me a lot of time to find the best garlic recipes.

Pssst...more apple recipes coming up!