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.
--
Andrew
Boyd
Feb
2015