Remember how I had garlic coming out of my ears a few days ago? Yeah, I still do. But today I found the time (which is a huge thing for me considering I have 5 young kids!) to pickle, freeze AND make dinner tonight with what was left of our first 3 lbs of garlic. Go me!
Trying to use up such an...odoriferous vegetable as garlic requires getting creative. Not wanting to waste it, I decided to pickle some. I've never pickled a garlic anything in my life. Actually, I haven't pickled ANYTHING in my life. Guess I need to get on that now, huh? I used a basic recipe I found in one of my german cookbooks for pickling:
2 cups garlic cloves
1 1/2 cups water
4 tsp salt
2 tsp dried herbs (I used thyme)
This was all assembled into a quart mason jar and is now fermenting happily on my counter for the next 3-7 days. I'll let ya know how it goes. Maybe pickled garlic is a delicacy that's been lost through the generations? Or maybe there's a reason no one eats it much. Either way, we now have a quart of it and someone's gotta eat it. Here's to hoping it's good!
My second way of preserving our garlicky abundance was to freeze it. I found a few options online while researching 'freezing garlic', and I opted for the oil method. Basically, I took a ratio of 2 parts garlic to 1 part olive oil, added it to my food processor and processed until it looked like minced garlic paste. Stored it in a mason jar and put it in the freezer. From what the food storage website said it should stay semi-firm and I can just pull out enough of the garlic mixture to cook with when I need garlic. Easy peasy! I tried it tonight when making dinner and it was great! Definitely going to do this again (possibly soon...we do have another 3 lbs to use up) when I have another free mason jar!
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