Never Enough Garlic

Every year around this time I wish we'd grown more garlic. I'm down to about 30 heads and experience tells me they'll be gone in no time.

Growing garlic in a home garden is fairly easy. It thrives in a wide range of climates, takes up little space, and keeps well after harvest in a cool dry area. We plant our garlic in the fall for harvest the following summer and grow several varieties each year. We generally include one or two varieties that we've never tried before, but in the end, I always come back to my two favorites: Spanish Roja and German Red.

One of my favorite ways to prepare garlic is to oven roast the whole peeled cloves in olive oil. In an hour, I have meltingly sweet garlic cloves and an aromatic garlic infused oil. Serve the warm cloves and oil with a loaf of crusty bread, a selection of local cheeses, and some local wines for a quick appetizer or light meal. You'll find directions for roasting garlic in the site's Winter Recipes section.

When I'm down to my last few heads, I always make 40 Cloves and a Chicken with one of my neighbor's beautiful meat birds as a "farewell" to our harvest. While the chicken is resting after it comes out of the oven, I brush one-inch thick baguette rounds with the oil and chicken juices that have collected in the bottom of the roasting pan and toast the rounds under the broiler until they're lightly browned. Then I spread them with the roasted garlic and serve them alongside the chicken. Add a quart of our canned green beans and dinner is served. That meal, which usually occurs sometime in January, always comes too soon.

Photo:Some of our 2007 garlic harvest