Garlic - The Thread

Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 
From: Sibyl Smirl 
To: anglican@list.stsams.org 
Subject: For the Beauty of the Earth 

I dug my first "ready" clump of garlic of the season yesterday, maybe
rushing it just a bit, because it was in the middle of a herb basket (those
everted car tires I've mentioned before) that I want to seed to something
else--the stuff gets around.  Actually, I didn't really need to wait until
it was ready, since I'll be using it right away anyway: I'm all out of last
years' stored crop.

The kind of garlic I have is a variety of rocambole (I don't know which
specific variety, got the start from Tinker's grandfather's yard), and one
of the neat things about that type, though it's not mentioned in the page I
reference below, is that when the plant has done all it's going to do for
the bulb this season, and it's ready to harvest for storage, the curlicues
in the stiff neck (a very Biblical plant! ;^)) suddenly uncurl, and the
neck stands up stiff and straight--and I do mean _sudden_!  One year when I
had gotten it together and done everything right the year before,
replanting a whole lot of the largest cloves on the same day, I went out
one morning and every neck, that had been curly the day before, was
standing up stiff and straight, all together like a row of soldiers at
attention!  Last year I was in a slump all summer, though not as bad as the
previous winter, and got very little done, and the jungle seriously
encroached, but you don't lose your garlic!  That stuff is a survivor and a
multiplier (I love survivor-types!  They survive my neglect!) and the
garlic in the beds, having started itself from different sizes of bulbs and
bulbils left in the ground, is not so uniform in its stage and size.  One
stalk in the particular clump I dug had straightened, but was still
drooping--the others were still curled.  

When I came in for the evening, I was too tired to really cook, but the
washed clump was lying on the cabinet, so I microwave-baked a potato,
melted cheddar on/in it (split and re-microwaved after it was done),
snipped a couple of the scapes onto the melted cheese, added fresh-ground
black pepper, and topped the whole with a large dollop of yogurt.  Pretty good!

I love garlic, for flavor, and for its many healthful qualities, and for
its Biblical nature.  One of the major things that the Israelites missed
about the fleshpots of Egypt, when they got bored with manna day in and day
out, was garlic.  If you listened to the health food nuts about its
healthful qualities, preventing and curing everything from cancer to old
age to plague to hangnails, you'd believe that all Italians were immortal,
what with the garlic and the tomatoes and the good red wine every day.  (I
guess if it's a certain kind of good red wine, it's Spiritual Immortality).
 I take most of what I read in the HFN literature with a whole cellarfull
of salt, but there's a useful modicum left--for example, that some of its
beneficial chemicals are enhanced or enabled by cooking, and others
destroyed by cooking, so that for health you need to eat it both ways. 
It's for sure that the _flavors_ are different (both good, IMHO) before and
after cooking.

I suspect that it's not true that garlic is an insect repellent (still not
sure about vampires--I've got a lot of garlic, and I don't have any
vampires).  In and around the bulbs of the clump I dug yesterday was a nest
of the very large kind of ants.  They weren't eating it, anyway, just
living among it.  They have to go find another place now, because today
I'll be loosening and stirring _all_ the soil in that basket, in
preparation for planting.  Then I'll wet it down good and let it settle for
a couple of days before putting in seed, probably lemon basil, maybe marjoram.

(SEE RECIPE PAGES: Garlic - The Links)

http://home.gwi.net/~troberts/farm/Garlic.html
http://botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/g/garlic06.html
http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/cgi-bin/pfaf/arr_html?Allium+sativum+ophioscorodon
   (LINK UPDATED - September 22, 2005 to:
   http://www.ibiblio.org/pfaf/cgi-bin/arr_html?Allium+sativum&CAN=COMIND) 

a selection of good pictures with different points of view
http://www.futurefoods.com/Graphics/rocambole.jpeg (LINK DEAD - January 5, 2004)
http://www.filareefarm.com/rocsplnt.gif
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/aromatiques.tropicales/imagesplantes/oignonroc.jpg
http://www.specialtyfoodamerica.com/Ecommerce%20catalogue/Garlic_-_Purple_Italian_Easy_Peel.jpg
  (LINK DEAD - January 5, 2004)

And this one isn't really relevant at all, but it turned up in my google
image search for rocambole, and it's so beautiful I couldn't resist
including it, though I don't know why it turned up.  It sure does
illustrate "For the beauty of the Earth"!
http://www.cuyonoticias.com.ar/images/mzagrande.jpg
  (LINK DEAD - January 5, 2004)

------------------------------
From: "Heather Angus" 

Thanks so much for this,  Sibyl. I am a sort of proto-herb gardener, about
at the level of the Neolithics when they first noticed that plants they
buried last year came up, oddly enough, in the same place!

I wanted to have an herb garden last year, so I did. I planted all these
nice herbs: rosemary, lemon balm, basil, oregano, lavender and mint. They
grew pretty well, especially when I wandered out and pulled a few weeks from
around them. I even picked som, but there it ended. I realized that I wanted
an herb garden just because it was cool. I have no idea what to do with
these things. I'm a vegetarian, so forget seasoning meat with them.  I
planted garlic this year for the first time, largely because it's one of the
few herbs I know what to do with (baked potatoes, as you say, and other nice
stuff).  I'm going to check out the links you gave, in hopes of finding out
what my other herbs do.

Heather
------------------------------

From: Sibyl Smirl 

> I'm going to check out the links you gave, in hopes of finding out
> what my other herbs do.

Well, there's a page from Mrs. Grieve's Herbal in there, botanical.com, I
think, and that's one of the best.  I have it on paper, had it before I
ever got onto the net, and still use it constantly.  It's kind of dated, I
think from the 1930s, but a classic and very comprehensive for the time
(that is, it doesn't include the last seventy years or so of medical and
nutritional research--you have to fill that in otherwise).  From the garlic
page, you ought to be able to get to the indexes--should be a link there
somewhere.  She's not too big on recipes, though.

There are herb recipes and culinary herb uses all over the web, many of
them vegetarian.  Google is your friend--run searches on things like "herb
recipes vegetarian" (without the quotes--quotes will get you the exact
phrase, which in this case you _don't_ want) or including the name of the
particular herb you have a supply of.

Henriette's Herbal Homepage bills itself as one of the oldest and largest
herbal information sites on the net and it is indeed one of the best, and
also a good place to start surfing from, besides google, following links
from one site to the next.

(SEE RECIPE PAGES: Garlic - The Links)
http://www.ibiblio.org/herbmed/index.html
------------------------------

From: Sibyl Smirl 

Heather Angus wrote:
> I'm a vegetarian, so forget seasoning meat with them.  

One thing you can do is my standard "casserole" thing, using vegetable oil
to saute the seasoning vegetables/herbs instead of the bacon, and rice
instead of the wheat (wheat in the grain can be pricey in health food
stores, but I grow the stuff on my land, and when I sell it, get maybe $3
for 60 lbs (a bushel) at the elevator, so it doesn't cost me much.)

SEE RECIPE: Garlic Wheat with Bacon
http://recipes.stsams.org/recipes/garwheatwbacon.html

For more herbal, you can use chives or garlic chives instead of the green
onions mentioned, also oregano and basil, but probably the chile peppers
would overpower those.  You might want to leave the peppers (that is, the
Ro-Tel) out, for a milder dish, and then the basil and oregano would be
great.  Using milder herbs in cooking something like this, stir them in at
the _end_ of the simmer period.  They smell great cooking, but all the
flavor goes into the air.

Marjoram and oregano can be substituted for each other, oregano is sort of
stronger and "wilder", but a close relative. Use them in anything Italian,
and vegarian spaghetti sauce (or lasagna sauce, or to put in a macaroni
casserole) is not hard at all: the basil can go in there too.  Mint and
lemon balm make good herb teas, or chopped in salads, and you can brew some
of the herb tea to mix with real tea for great flavored iced tea.  I've
seen culinary uses of lavender, but it's mostly a scent herb, I think, nice
for making sachets, and supposed to be insect repellent when you put the
bags of it in with linens, plus making them smell nice, also aromatherapy
for relaxing.  Rosemary is an energizing and antidepressant aromatherapy
thing--all the food things I can think of offhand to do with it involve
meat (I'm not vegetarian), but it's another herb tea, and there's some
reason to use that one as a hair rinse--I don't remember what it's supposed
to do there.  Okay, I just remembered using Rosemary with two or three
other things in a herb bread--that would be vegetarian.

I think I'm too tired--galloping off madly in all directions.  Anyway,
there are _millions_ of things to do with herbs!
------------------------------

From: Sibyl Smirl 
> I'm a vegetarian....

May I ask what sort?  Do you eat fish?  milk?  eggs?  some vegans draw the
line even beyond sugar, which has an animal involved in the processing
somewhere, I don't remember just where, or honey, which is a product of insects.

Do you operate your kitchen with complementary proteins?
------------------------------
From: "Heather Angus" 

Sibyl,

First, many thanks for your suggestions about herbs. I'm printing them off
and will definitely try them. I've felt so silly having a pretty functional
herb garden and nothing to do with it.

I'm the sort of vegetarian who just doesn't eat anything that had parents.
:-) So, no fish, but lots of dairy stuff and eggs. I eat a lot of cheese,
which probably accounts for the fact that changing to a vegetarian diet did
not result in any weight loss. :-(   Vegetarians like me still eat our hot
fudge sundaes!

I did have a friend who was a strict vegan once -- no animal products
whatsoever. I remember attending a party of hers, where there was a whole
table covered with various vegan dishes, some of them steaming hot. There
was no smell of anything in the room whatsoever. It seemed very odd. Anyway,
she underwent a major and inexplicable conversion -- well, maybe not
inexplicable. Anyway, she now feasts on such things as prime rib roast and
buffalo livers. Go figure.

Again, thank you so much for the herb tips! I'll write more when I'm not so
tired.

Heather