In my family, there is no such thing as “too much garlic.” That applies both to the amount of garlic used in a dish, as well as the variety of foods to which garlic may be added. My problem is that while I love garlic and indeed put it in almost everything I eat, I HATE the chore of peeling and cutting fresh cloves. Yet, as even my confused self knows, fresher is better.
- The dilemma: Improve my cooking by using fresh ingredients, starting with fresh garlic.
- The solution: Get over myself and just peel and chop the dang gloves.
- The method: A new trick I discovered, courtesy of one of my aunts.
There are really several complaints I have with the whole garlic process:
- Peeling it makes my fingers sticky;
- My inexperience with fine chopping poses a significant threat to my fingers;
- The garlic goes bad relatively quickly if I don’t use it fast enough (which I don’t because I tend to avoid the first two points).
Lucky for me, I have some family members who cook on the regular, and they’re actually good at it. They’ve also been doing it for a while, you know, to keep me and my cousins alive and such, and they know some neat tricks I’m starting to pick up on.
So, to solve this dilemma of all dilemmas, here’s what I learned:
Buy the garlic. Peel all of it. Store the cloves in a bowl of olive oil. Refrigerate.
This part still sucked pretty bad.
Now I have fresh garlic!
Basically the way that I’ll deal with the whole chopping off my fingers fear is to buy a garlic press, another thrilling discovery.
