Foto Friday: Garlic whistles 25 May 2007 10:32 pm
Posted by Tracy in : pictures, garden, seasonality, agriculture, eating, cooking , trackbackTa-dah!
Also called garlic scapes or garlic flowers — I saw them being sold under that last name at the Portland Farmers Market on Wednesday, but didn’t have the presence of mind to take a picture to prove it — these “whistles” are indeed garlic’s attempt to bloom and go to seed. But we humans thwart that attempt, as we do with all plants cultivated for their delicious leaves (and believe it or not, garlic cloves are actually technically overgrown leaves), by which I mean to say we cut the flowers off, so the plants don’t get all distracted and devote all their energy to growing flowers and seeds instead of tasty leaves. I probably should have cut these off even sooner than I did, but oh well.
This year’s garlic whistles (my first crop of this kind ever, yay!) were delicious, just pan-roasted in a little bit of olive oil, alongside boiled new potatoes from our CSA farm, Groundwork Organics. (I tried to take pictures of the cooking process and the dinner plates, but none of the attempts turned out fabulous enough to share, so use your imagination.) The greens were tender and mildly garlicky, with a crunch almost like asparagus or fiddlehead ferns (and they looked almost as fancy as the second), and the potatoes were delicate and buttery even before I added any fat at all (olive oil on my first helping, butter on the second… mmm). Yay for such exquisitely simple deliciousness!
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Mmmmmmmmmm……
Germans seem to have something similar: Baerlauch, which grows in springtime here in Bavaria. Germans grind up the leaves and make pesto with it and put it into pasta (especially Spaetzle…)
Very good for you, too.
Thanks for this nice article!