By Lucette
Like a lot of ELCers, I've been turning to my garden this month for some local eating. The tomatoes and peppers are only flowers so far, but I've got 3 kinds of lettuce, radishes, parsley, dill, sage, cilantro, mustard, mint, spinach, and chard in various sizes and states of growth. I've been making a lunch for myself that consists of rice and a bit of butter and a couple of handfuls of green things snipped in the garden--very nice.
I also have the solution to a garden mystery. I've lived in this house for 20 years, and I've been gardening for nineteen of them. And all that time I've been trying to identify one of the garden heirlooms I inherited from the former owners. Thanks to the ELC in general and Barbara of Tigers and Strawberries in particular, I have the answer: garlic scapes.
I kept reading about garlic scapes on various blogs. Garlic scapes are at the farmers market! I would go to the North Union market and ask around. Garlic scapes? does anyone have garlic scapes? So and so had some, but they're sold out, I'd hear. Or, I had some last week but they're all gone now. I'd resigned myself to a garlic-scape-less diet, for this year at least.
Barbara featured garlic scapes in a recipe on her blog at the beginning of June--a variant of Spicy Thai Basil Chicken which I read, drooling a little. If only I had some of those garlic scapes, I thought. She had a picture, which I examined as if it was of James Marsters, committing every glorious vegetable to memory. Somewhat later in June, I went out to my garden to pick some of this and that, and admired the tops of the mystery onionish thing that's been growing wild in my garden since I moved in. I sometimes pull some of them in the early spring when they're like strong green onions, but otherwise have left them alone except occasionally to use their graceful, curving tops in flower arrangements.
But this time, prompted by hunger or my fruitless search for garlic scapes, I looked at them and thought, hmmm, and then aha! Those are not peculiar green onions or walking onions (as I once thought they were), but just plain old garlic, and along with them, my heart's desire: garlic scapes.
I haven't really used them yet, only cut up a couple of them for my rice and greens lunch yesterday, but I see a glorious stir-fry in my future. (Also, I'll have to try and move some of them out from under that rock they've been growing under.)
Lucette writes, teaches, and gardens in Cleveland, Ohio, and blogs at vintagecook.
