Friday, June 27, 2008
Scape Session
I come from a smelly, smelly family. We love garlic. We love it a lot. My mom used to roast entire heads and we’d pop the cloves straight. I always thought we were somehow unique, until someone (Melissa Clark) with a much larger readership than me wrote in last week’s New York Times about her family’s garlic worship. Turns out I’m not the only smelly kid. Anyhow, Clark details her trials and tribulations with the beautiful and elusive garlic scape, the early-budding flower shoots of the subterranean garlic bulb. I was immediately on a mission (admittedly, a short one, since the Union Square Greenmarket is blocks away from the office). Here are the fruits of my labor:
In her article, Clark recommends making scape pesto, but I didn’t have enough and felt strangely opposed to chopping the shit and shape out of the gorgeous green tendrils. So I decided to make an almost disgustingly healthy and simple stir fry with some fresh sugar-snap peas (also from the USQ market) and leftover cremini mushrooms. Yeah, that’s it. No rice. No noodles. No chicken, no shrimp, no real protein of any kind. Whatever, I try to keep it light one meal a week to offset the bacon/burger/dairy overload I usually clog my insides with. So basically it’s all that vegetable goodness, plus soy sauce (liquid salt—nom nom), sesame oil, a splash of red wine vin, and a wee little bit of fresh ginger.
It was good. The scapes, snacked on raw by a few brave/stupid people (me), lost some of their sinus-clogging bite after they’d been cooked for a few, though I kind of wish they’d kept more…garlicy flavor? It was a bit too mellow for me. The mushrooms absorbed most of the soy sauce and became tender little salt-bombs, and the sugar snap peas remained snappy (side note: does anyone else feel like they’re eating Gushers when the little pods explode while you chew?)
Summertime = vegetables = happy stomach.
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1 comment:
mmh...
i really love garlic.
with eggs!
cheers from Chile!
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