The garlic of the world is so powerfully good right now, I have been going through at least a head per day (though admittedly they are of the teeny farmer’s market variety). I found some recipes in a book on Japanese pickle making that involve sticking lots and lots of cloves of garlic in miso and in honey (but not together), so I did that in hopes of having some decent garlic to eat in the winter. A few years ago I realized that at some point wintertime garlic became inedible—rubbery and sulfurous with a flavor like dirty pocket change. I just quit eating it out of season because it wasn’t worth it. Someone told me that nearly all the garlic on the market now is grown in China, and is bred for shipping rather than flavor. You can tell. If not by the flavor, by the post supper quease and morning after armpit stench of everyone at your feed trough the night before. The honey garlic is particularly pretty. I tasted it the other day, and while it was very good, I don’t think it’s ready yet. The honey is fizzy and fermented and golden and the outside of the garlic is soft and sweet as though it’s been cooked, but the inside is still a bit macho for eating straight. Speaking of macho (and quién es más), my mum used to make an evil brew in the winter called Fire Tonic or Super Tonic or something. It had hot peppers, ginger, garlic, an iron pentagram, and the still beating heart of a virgin steeped in cider vinegar. I seem to remember it being foully effective at curing colds, though my sisters and I never liked to risk the side effect of chest hair everyone goes gleefully on about. But now that I’m an old wife, maybe it’s time to start keeping something like that around.
I am starting to be a bit sensitive about my recipe free lifestyle but really people, you should all pipe down (a blop is an excellent unit of measurement) and just eat while you can because sometimes I make very fine things out of whatever’s in the house and unless the circumstances repeat themselves precisely, the meal’s a one off. This weekend it was a simple posole sort of soup out of a flavorful but very gristly lamb roast, oversize novelty corn, and an exceptionally fine guinea hen stock. (The Violet Hill people have sold me on guinea hen instead of chicken lately.) I didn’t have any cabbage and I don’t love lettuce in soup, so I served it with things from the garden—amaranth greens, chopped onion, tomato, lime (from my garden in the way the Mexican takeout from around the corner comes from my kitchen), and oregano. The immature aji amarillo from the garden didn’t provide much in the way of heat, but they were tasty… What else? Oh—a cold pureed soup made with the same stock base, avocado, lime, garlic, hot peppers, oil and herbs with lots of chopped tomato and some more olive oil on top. Very much like eating a bowl of avocado salsa. Good for supper with beer and a boiled egg, as are most things. And I sort of invented a dairy free ice cream to accommodate junior’s dairy allergy. Everything goes in the blender: a can of coconut milk (In my vast experience with coconut milk as a dairy substitute in the last two years, I can say that organic usually tastes a lot better), two egg yolks, a good quarter cup blop of ghee (Some people who are allergic to casein can eat ghee since the protein part of the butter is gone. The concentrated butter flavour gives a nice creamy complex dairy-ness and cancels our some of the coconut.), vanilla, a pinch of salt, honey to taste (start with a quarter cup and keep adding until it’s sweet enough. Every honey is different so it’s really impossible to give precise measurements when it comes to sweetness or wetness. Beware recipes that do. In this recipe honey is superior to sugar in that it’s adds a bit more of the kind of depth that dairy has.), and cocoa powder to taste. This ice cream will hold a lot of cocoa. You can get it really dark and intense without it starting to taste at all powdery. It shouldn’t taste obviously coconutty either. When it seems right, put it in the ice cream maker, etcetera, etcetera, until the eating part, when you eat it with gusto. Hey—that’s pretty close to a recipe!
And before I forget:
Category 4 cynicism at Slacktivist.
A bioengineered mouse tooth. (And the original article.)
