Green Garlic

In February last year, I wrote a blog entry about the many different types of garlic that are available, Garlic for the Garden,  which includes a link with pictures of our 2014 garlic harvest.  

If you read that article, you will learn that we normally plant garlic in the fall and harvest it the following June.  This method gives you nice big heads of garlic that contain many cloves.  However, if you wait until the spring to plant some of your garlic, then you can have what I call "green garlic".  Green garlic is like green onions in that you dig it before it is ripe.  Here is what it looks like at this stage.

Notice it looks very much like a green onion.  But, the leaves of garlic are flat.

The leaves are too tough to eat, but the bottom part below the leaves can be sliced and sauteed to give a nice mild garlic flavor to whatever it is cooked with.

I like to saute green garlic with asparagus to make a tasty side dish.  Just slice the asparagus into 1 inch slices and throw it in a pan along with the sliced garlic and a tablespoon of olive oil.

I have a well-used wok that I use for this task.  Stir-fry it until the asparagus is crisp-tender.  Then, add salt and pepper to taste, and you have a vegetable dish that is to die for!

I didn't realize when I took this picture that the food in the upper right looks like pizza.  It's actually a piece of pork steak that was cooked in the oven along with rice, tomatoes, onions and peppers.  It just so happened that I cut the meat into smaller pieces and the piece I ended up with was triangular shaped.  

I don't know why I felt compelled to clarify that point, except that I'm not a big pizza fan, and the thought of eating rice, pizza and asparagus is, well, just disgusting to me!