Roasted Garlic

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     There are many things that can make your life better and more enjoyable.  Roasted garlic is one of them.  Robots are another.  Don’t believe me?  Well, tell Alexa to have the Roomba clean your house while you head out to take your dog for a walk, get some of that vitamin D everyone’s always raving about, and bask in all of the things you suddenly have just a little bit more free time for!  Like roasting garlic.  The future is now, people.  Let the great robot takeover of humanity begin!  Just kidding.  Sort of.

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     There are plenty of different methods for roasting garlic, and for a long time I went with the standard: Slice the top off a head of garlic, drizzle with olive oil, season with salt, wrap in foil and roast.  One problematic aspect for me here is that I often have the hard neck variety of garlic on hand and trying to saw through it, well, you see, I like my knives, and they didn’t do anything to deserve such treatment.  I mean, the standard method works, and it’s fine for soft neck varieties of garlic, but…

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     Every-damn-time, some of the cloves end up burnt because the sizes of them vary (nature, go figure).  And what?  Are you supposed to just throw away the little tippity-tops of the sliced off garlic cloves?  Save them in the fridge to use when in need of raw garlic—but, that’s not where you normally store garlic—so you keep reaching for it from its usual location instead and only remember those need-to-use-garlic-scraps when you open the refrigerator doors and the smell is so pungent it burns your nostrils along with your short-term memory?  And yeah, sure, you can take the whole head of roasted garlic and squeeze the cloves out, but after awhile the novelty of that is overshadowed by the nuisance of getting oily garlic paper off your hands and fingers while deep in the recesses of your mind, you know you didn’t get all of the roasted garlic out of there, and it it eats away at you.  It bothers you.  

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     Or at least it does me.  I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t like wasting food and neither should you.  There are so many recipes or methods of food preparation that nonchalantly instruct food waste with the loaded command of: “do so and so and then discard this or that...”  I mean, how many times have you seen a step like that in a recipe and thought: “Why?  I’m sure I can do something with this.”  (I’m looking at you, gazpacho .)   

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     Look, many of us make mistakes sometimes and overshop or overlook something that we keep reminding ourselves needs to be eaten or it’s gonna go bad and then end up tossing it later on anyway while silently cursing ourselves.  I’ll even go so far as to admit that wasting food makes me feel like a bad person.  Like, a really bad person.  Now, some of that guilt is valid, because I know I’m doing something wrong.  The rest though, that life-sentence kind of guilt, I’m gonna go right ahead and pin a portion of that onto years, and years, and years of Catholic schooling.  But that’s what therapy is for, right?  You might be thinking “Yikes.”  I know I am.    

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     What was I talking about?  Oh yeah.  This method for roasting garlic is one tiny example of how sometimes when you stop to think about what it is that you’re doing, you realize there’s gotta be a better way than what you’re used to, or than what is common practice.  Metaphorical light bulbs go off when you question things.  Occasionally.

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     As to why roasted garlic will make your life better?  Well, if you’ve made it before I shouldn’t have to tell you.  But, if you haven’t, how lucky you are!  It’s a whole new world!  Spread it on toasted or untoasted bread, whip it into butter or mix it into mayonnaise, add it to grilled cheese sandwiches, soups, pastas, salad dressings, baked potatoes, focaccia, hell, pop those sweet cloves into your mouth instead of candy!  Roasted garlic cloves, like fresh herbs, are transcendent ingredients to always have on hand, because they pack a wallop of flavor, and because I know I can call upon these life-enhancing things to make something go from “mmmmm!” to “MMMMM!”  

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Roasted Garlic
Ingredients:

• 1 head garlic
• 2 tablespoons XVOO
• A heavy pinch of salt

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Method:

1. Preheat oven to 350°F
2. Separate and peel the garlic cloves.  Trim the woody root-end from each garlic clove, taking care not to unnecessarily lob off the good stuff!  
3. Put the garlic cloves into the center of a square of aluminum foil (or parchment paper).  Drizzle the olive oil over them and sprinkle with salt.  Try to keep the larger cloves on the bottom and prop any smaller cloves up on top of them so that they don’t burn before the larger ones are cooked, or, if some cloves are drastically smaller you can just add them during the second half of roasting.  
4. Bunch the corners of the foil up together and roll over and down a bit—not quite like an aluminum foil swan but maybe more like a sort of aluminum foil dumpling.  Place the pouch in a small iron skillet or onto a sheet pan and roast for 20 minutes.
5. Remove from the oven and *carefully* open the pouch: Keep your hands clear from the opening while the steam escapes because, man, steam burns really hurt.  Use a spoon to flip the cloves over—which should be in the process of turning golden-brown—roll the foil back over and return the whole thing to the oven for another 15 minutes.  Remove from the oven and again, *carefully* open up the pouch.  The garlic cloves should all be a nice golden-brown at this point.  Open the pouch all the way and allow the garlic to cool.  Transfer to a small dish, and be sure to collect all the roasted garlic oil that drips off as well, because that’s liquid gold.

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