The Garlic Escapade

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!

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