Roast Garlic

 

Ok, this isn’t a totally flying-related article.  But you might have a BBQ at your hangar, and you might get hungry sometime.  And you might want to cook a steak after you’re finished for the day, all sweaty after beating yourself up with +ve and –ve G.

 

You’re going to have sautéed mushrooms and onions on the steak.  Good move.  You might also have some garlic mashed potatoes for your carb. 

 

I suppose you could also have a vegetable – say some broccoli or asparagus – to get your vitamin C, but a better use of your time might be to see if you can actually go four months without any fruit or vegetables in your diet whatsoever (it’s not as easy as it sounds) to try to develop the onset of scurvy, which would be quite a worthwhile and unique accomplishment in our time.

 

As usual, I digress horribly.  This article is about a really neat vegetable – garlic, which is actually part of the onion family.

 

While you’re at the store, buying the steaks, also buy some bulbs of garlic.  They will be in that foreign “vegetable” section of the store.  They are not very large, kind of lumpy and sort of a white colour.  They don’t cost much.

 

Also, hit the bakery section of the store and buy a bag of fresh rolls.  They should still be mushy when you squeeze them.  Butter rolls are good.

 

Now we’re going to prep the garlic.  So easy even I can do it.  Peel off some (but not all) of the layers, and cut one end off with a sharp knife, leaving an opening about 1.5 inches to the inside of the garlic blub.  Tear off a piece of aluminum foil and wrap it underneath the bulb, leaving the top opening exposed.

 

Take some olive oil and slowly dribble some into the exposed top of the garlic bulb.  Be patient while it absorbs.  This is important.  Once you have done that, sprinkle some pepper and salt on the top opening as well.  It will stick to the oil.

 

Now, take the bulb and cook it either in the BBQ or oven at between 375F to 400F for around 40 minutes.  You will know it’s done when the top gets a nice crispy brown.  If you leave it in too long, it will start to blacken and burn at the exposed top, and cloves will start to pop up.  Don’t do that.

 

Try to time it so that your steak and the garlic and whatever else are all done at the same time.  This in my experience is the hard part of cooking.  Any dolt can heat stuff up (or burn it) but it takes skill to have a bunch of different stuff all done at the same time, so nothing gets cold, or sits being warmed.

 

So, your roast garlic is done.  It’s going to be a wee bit hot.  Put it on a small plate and toss away the aluminum foil.

 

Now rip open one of your fresh buns, and take a rounded-tip knife and peel one of the cooked garlic cloves out of the blub, and mush the soft roast garlic onto the bun like butter.  You don’t actually even need any butter, though if you are a complete and unashamed hedonist you could microwave the buns for a few seconds to warm them, and then spread warm butter and then roast garlic on them.

 

You’ll have to excuse me, I just wet myself just thinking about that.

 

Anyways.  If you can fly surface-level aerobatics, with a little practice you can probably even learn to cook, because you probably like to eat.  Freddy taught me that.

 

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Andrew Boyd

acboyd@gmail.com

Feb 2015