Garlic Harvest, Part II

A couple of weeks ago, I pulled the garlic from the garden and spread it to dry, stems and all, on the concrete floor under our deck. A couple of days later, I peeled off the outer leaves, culled for the refrigerator a few of the bulbs that were showing some deterioration, and, for convenience’s sake, moved the rest to the garage floor to finish curing. Then, I kind of forgot about them.

Finally, today, I thought to go check on the drying process. A little over half of the heads had cured nicely and were ready to have their leaves braided. The others each had some stinky brown rotten spots. So I braided the heads that were good enough for keeping, hung them on the side of a cupboard in the kitchen, and then turned my attention to the sadder-looking bulbs.

I cut some open to see what the damage was, and it turned out that most of the cloves were perfectly fine. There were just one or two in each head that looked like they were starting to get eaten by some kind of maggot. Though one head didn’t have any cloves at all; it was just a papery mass!

So I peeled all the heads and kept the good cloves. I put them in the food processor and poured in enough olive oil to cover. Then I puréed them into a sauce with the appearance of melted butter. I licked a drop off my finger–whew! this is potent stuff! The whole lot of it went into a Tupperware into the freezer, to be dished out as needed. (With all that oil in there, it won’t freeze solid.)