The new garlic harvest arrived

I bought six heirloom seed garlic bulbs at the Eggplant Urban Farm Supply shop on Selby Ave in St.Paul MN last fall and planted the cloves in November in my garden, a bit late but still.  The original seed bulbs came from the Filaree Garlic Farm in Okanogan, WA. I followed their growing recommendation to the letter, which means, plant the cloves and basically forget about them except for some weeding and the occasional bit of watering. Dead easy...

This weekend was harvest time.  I was completely overwhelmed with the result, spectacular large bulbs came out of the ground. 
They are now "curing" this is a fancy word for drying. As you can see, I have enough garlic for the year.

In other words, it’s time to think about cooking with garlic and as a garlic-loving cook this is a real great time of the year. New garlic is fresh and crisp, the cloves are bursting with flavor, so now is the time to use it in everything, grated raw into salads, simmered or roasted to get out the sweetness.

I came across several recipes:
David Lebovitz's Chopped salad with lemon-garlic dressing
New York Times: Provençal Garlic Soup with poached egg
Karen Hursh Graber of Mexconnect: Sopa de Ajo Mexicana
Lorraine Pascale's: Camembert and roasted garlic
James Martin's: Forty garlic clove chicken with garlic mushrooms and garlic croustades

Last but certainly not least, one of my favorites: roasted garlic ice-cream.
I first tasted this at Sebastian Joe's in Minneapolis. Shockingly delicious is the right expression. There are several recipes to be found on the web, this one is from Kathryn Vercillo: 3 Ways for how to make garlic ice-cream.
 
Enjoy the garlic season.

BBQ flat bread with wild garlic dressing

Wild garlic is the first produce of my garden in spring, before the asparagus and salad. Wild garlic is a woodland plant that comes out of the ground before the trees get leaves to take full advantage of the sunlight. It also looks very much like lilies-of-the-valley, a poisonous plant, so be careful if you pick wild garlic in the woods.
Wild garlic can be used in many ways but Jamie shows a very simple recipe of barbecued bread with a wild garlic dressing. Of course you do not need to bbq bread, you can also bake a flat bread in the oven.

Here are some more recipes:
deliciousmagazine
woodlands
eatweeds
Nigel Slater's nettle and wild garlic recipes

Enjoy Jamie's video...

The Trinidad Scorpion Chilli

Time has come to order seeds for my vegetable garden. I have been succesfully growing Jalapeno chillies in the past 2 years, this time around I want to try something a bit more powerful. Scotch bonnet is a very hot chilli used mainly in the Caribbean cuisine. It is not easy to get chillies where I live, let alone Scotch Bonnet,so I decided to try to grow them myself. Looking around the web for a seed company selling chilli seeds, I stumbled over TheHippySeedCompany in Australia.
Their collection of chilli seeds is impressive but their Youtube Chilli Tests are even more amazing.
The guy eats a whole Trinidad Scorpion Chilli, the hottest thing on earth...WATCH IF YOU DARE

Market-Fresh Microgreens

Pea shoots seem to be the new hype in high end restaurants as a garnish. The shoots taste fantastic, almost like eating peas... Where are these shoots come from, how are they grown. Investigating this I learned a new word: "Microgreens".
Microgreens are different from sprouts in that they are grown in soil while sprouts are not. Growing microgreens seems to be very easy and can be done on a window sill, a conservatory or a greenhouse.
The first video gives a bit more background. If you want to try growing microgreens and sprouts, watch the second video.

Ingredients : Science Top 10s : Science Channel

I stumbled across a list of the 10 weirdest ingredients on the Science Channel of Discovery.com.
This is what the introduction to the list says:
"As common as these ingredients are, they're not exactly what you would expect. Some are not even what you would WANT to expect. For all the times your mother asked, "Do you know what's IN that?", you'll be armed and ready with the answers. And the nausea that probably accompanies them."
Enjoy the story, here is the link: Ingredients : Science Top 10s : Science Channel

Gourmet Salts

Did you also wonder what all those expensive Maldon, Guérande, Hawaiian and Himalayan salts are about. Is salt the next foodie hype ? 
Find out more in this video

The 11 best foods to eat, that are also easy to get.

Dr. Bowden, author of “The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth,” made a list of the favorite foods that are easy to find but don’t always find their way into our shopping carts. 
1. Beets
2. Cabbage
3. Chard
4. Cinnamon
5. Pomegranate juice
6. Dried plums
7. Pumpkin seeds
8. Sardines
9. Turmeric
10. Frozen blueberries
11. Canned pumpkin
To read the full story, click here to go to the article in the NYTimes

Maggie Beer talks about Verjuice

Maggie Beer is an Australian winemaker who has pioneered the re-discovery of Verjuice or "green juice". Verjuice is made from unripe grapes or apples and was widely used as an acidulant before the introduction of lemon juice. It was almost completely forgotten but was re-discovered by a few cooks in the past years.


Sources of verjuice:

Germany: Weingut Fuchs - Löbbe
UK: Verjuice Company
Switzerland: Daily Food
Benelux:Weingut Fuchs

News For Curious Cooks: Cilantro flavor, loved and hated

The taste of Cilantro (US English for Coriander) is definetely an acquired one. At first it tastes like soap. My first experience was in a Vietnamese restaurant in the 80s in Paris. They called it Chinese parsley perhaps to make it more palatable to their clients. Anyway, I started to get used to the taste and in fact I really like it now. Harold McGee of The Curious Cook shared an article on his blog which sheds some light on why this is an acquired taste. News For Curious Cooks in the New York Times: Cilantro flavor, loved and hated
Checking out the net I stumbled over lots of websites about the Cilantro/Coriander taste. There is a real anti-cilantro community out there. Take a look at this one. "I hate Cilantro"