Three summers ago I had never tasted a garlic scape, now it's not the start of summer without them!
What are these pretty little curlicues and what makes them so special?
Garlic scapes are the flower stalk of the hardneck garlic plant before that the plant produces before the garlic starts to bulb. Even if you're not interested in eating them, it's a good idea to cut them off the garlic plant. If the scape isn't cut off, the plant with put energy into making that flower instead of growing big, delicious bulbs of garlic, besides, with their mild, garlic flavor, the scapes are amazing!
It's up to you what you do with your scapes-you can grill them, sauté them, eat them raw, throw them in pasta or eggs, even pickle them. And fine, yes, that is all tasty and great but I think you're missing out if you're not making pesto. Really the best pesto ever! This is unfortunately my last batch of garlic scape pesto for the season.
This year I'm growing two different kinds of garlic: Music and Killarney Red. This is the first time I've grown two different kinds of garlic and the unexpected best part of this is that their scapes were ready to harvest a couple different times.
The first batch is almost gone already and in the second batch I didn't have a huge amount of scapes, so I made arugula/scape pesto. This time I've got loads! It is recommended that you cut off the top flower part of the scape because it adds a more heat to the taste of the pesto. I leave it on. I do that for two reasons: one) I love the flavor and two) I'm super lazy.
I knew I was little behind in harvesting the last of them, then my friend Dionne sent me this recipe this morning and I knew I had to get this done today.
GARLIC SCAPE PESTO
1 cup garlic scapes cut in 1 inch pieces
1 cup grated Parmesan or Asiago cheese
3 Tablespoons lemon juice
1/2 cup olive oil
1/2 cup pine nuts, cashews or almonds
Blend garlic scapes, olive oil, lemon juice and cheese in food processor then stir in nuts.
This was the biggest batch of pesto I've made this season....and my poor food processor is dying! I have to hold everything together just right to get it to work. I'm really hoping I get a new one before the height of canning season hits!
The best way for us to store all this is to freeze it! In regular old ice cube trays. Once they're frozen solid, I'll pop them out into freezer bags. To use, I microwave the pesto cubes with a little bit of olive, and that's it! Use on pizzas, in eggs, or quiche, or pasta-the list goes on and on! This will just have to keep us until we have enough basil to make even more pesto, which should only be about a week or two!
Friday, June 27, 2014
Thursday, June 12, 2014
Our new (old) view!
No one could have ever told me I would be so excited about a new fence and gates!
While our old fence might have looked a little like a big version of a white picket fence, it was essentially useless. The vast majority of the posts were completely rotten, making it not at all goat proof. Our gates have never closed all the way, or just blew off their hinges, again, useless! But it looked nice...from a distance. (please notice: the gate is off it's hinges in this pic!)
With the goats working in tandem to knock the fence over and escape forever (or at least to the porch), it was time for the old fence to go. We hired Dave the fence guy and his son Matthew build us a new fence. Two weeks after meeting for the first time, the fence was planned and demolition had started. Not surprising, it didn't take much to clear out the old. The post were so rotten that a lot of them just toppled over when the boards connecting them were removed.
I hadn't thought about the time between fence demo and fence building. I was super nervous, but I just kept Bear's shock collar charged and got a Hyperdog tennis ball slingshot-to take advantage our yard/pasture combo-now I kinda miss all that wide open space!
But we hired the guys to build a fence and that they did! Now we have a 5 foot tall fence that goats will (probably) never be able to escape, and may even be zombie proof! This makes the vast majority of our pasture more useful, since the old fence was only 4 feet high and built only to keep horses in. I love that we can see through it. Instead of looking out a rotten white boards that we always needed to repaint, but were never going to, we get to see the animals!
We changed a thing or too as well! The greenhouse is now part of the yard! Well, it still mostly looks like pasture, but it's wide open to the yard. Now I don't have to drag things through a broken down gate just to get to the front of the greenhouse. I freaking love this!
We also added three pens along the length of the greenhouse space. We'll mostly use these for keeping our gentleman on lock down away from the ladies, but also potentially for keeping pigs or turkey later (soon!).
I feel like I could right a whole separate post as an ode to gates that really close all the way, that won't be blown off their hinges by a strong wind, that are solid, but light, that actually freaking work! Maybe I'm just easily impressed!
This ties our other major home improvement-the patio-in cost. While I can't imagine our house without the new patio, this new fence is kind of a game changer! It feels like we are one step closer to being actual farmers-but we need to make bigger steps, like getting a tractor and haying before we can come close to calling ourselves that, but we're on our way. This is going to lead to keeping all our male animals at our house, which means we will control when we breed our animals, as well as getting (more) different kinds of animals, and using our pasture more efficiently. So, yeah, I'm pretty excited!
While our old fence might have looked a little like a big version of a white picket fence, it was essentially useless. The vast majority of the posts were completely rotten, making it not at all goat proof. Our gates have never closed all the way, or just blew off their hinges, again, useless! But it looked nice...from a distance. (please notice: the gate is off it's hinges in this pic!)
With the goats working in tandem to knock the fence over and escape forever (or at least to the porch), it was time for the old fence to go. We hired Dave the fence guy and his son Matthew build us a new fence. Two weeks after meeting for the first time, the fence was planned and demolition had started. Not surprising, it didn't take much to clear out the old. The post were so rotten that a lot of them just toppled over when the boards connecting them were removed.
I hadn't thought about the time between fence demo and fence building. I was super nervous, but I just kept Bear's shock collar charged and got a Hyperdog tennis ball slingshot-to take advantage our yard/pasture combo-now I kinda miss all that wide open space!
But we hired the guys to build a fence and that they did! Now we have a 5 foot tall fence that goats will (probably) never be able to escape, and may even be zombie proof! This makes the vast majority of our pasture more useful, since the old fence was only 4 feet high and built only to keep horses in. I love that we can see through it. Instead of looking out a rotten white boards that we always needed to repaint, but were never going to, we get to see the animals!
We changed a thing or too as well! The greenhouse is now part of the yard! Well, it still mostly looks like pasture, but it's wide open to the yard. Now I don't have to drag things through a broken down gate just to get to the front of the greenhouse. I freaking love this!
We also added three pens along the length of the greenhouse space. We'll mostly use these for keeping our gentleman on lock down away from the ladies, but also potentially for keeping pigs or turkey later (soon!).
I feel like I could right a whole separate post as an ode to gates that really close all the way, that won't be blown off their hinges by a strong wind, that are solid, but light, that actually freaking work! Maybe I'm just easily impressed!
This ties our other major home improvement-the patio-in cost. While I can't imagine our house without the new patio, this new fence is kind of a game changer! It feels like we are one step closer to being actual farmers-but we need to make bigger steps, like getting a tractor and haying before we can come close to calling ourselves that, but we're on our way. This is going to lead to keeping all our male animals at our house, which means we will control when we breed our animals, as well as getting (more) different kinds of animals, and using our pasture more efficiently. So, yeah, I'm pretty excited!
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