The Garlic Escapade
June 23, 2011
Hi friends! Today want to talk about garlic scapes. In case you don’t know what a garlic scape is, it is the flower stalk of a hardneck garlic plant, picked before the flower can bloom, thus enabling the garlic to grow bigger, without having to use energy to bloom a flower.
Here’s one of my little helpers, hanging out in the garlic.
When we first bought our house, I noticed that a previous occupant grew several garlic plants against the garage. But, because we were so busy working on the house, I didn’t do anything with them last year. Now we have our garden in and the garlic is flourishing. When the plants started shooting out their scapes this year, I wasn’t going to let them go to waste.
With a little help from one of the gnomes, the scapes were harvested.
All clean and ready to go!
As you can see, my harvest was a large one! I didn’t quite know what to use them for first, so I decided to use them as a topping on myblue cheese BBQ tempeh sandwich.
I also figured they made a dandy replacement for the yucky stalk of celery in a Bloody Mary.
I also chopped some up to use in a polenta Parmesan dish I made last night, which I will be sharing on the blog soon. I plan on using as many as I can and then freezing the rest. You can use the scapes to make pesto too, but I my basil plant isn’t big enough for that, yet.
Have a great night everybody, and keep cooking!
