Roasted Garlic

Before the oven...

Jake and I seem to love to eat stinky things. Garlic and onions are just tops in our book. I made this recipe for Lemony Bulgur with Asparagus and Spinach from last year (and yes, this time I had asparagus to use for the recipe) for dinner. We are trying to make sure we eat up all our nice, yummy fresh veggies before we head off to Silver City, NM to go camping Thursday-Saturday and that recipe hit the spot. I had forgotten how delicious it was. ANYWAY, Jake was lamenting the fact that he has a surplus of bacon grease that he needs to start using (we save the bacon grease when he makes bacon and we use it to make other stuff sometimes and get a bacon-y flavor). I remembered a recipe from my “Encyclopedia of Vegetables and Vegetarian Cooking” book on roasting garlic. We had 4 bulbs of garlic in the onion and garlic basket by the stove. I figured we might as well eat garlic (which is super healthy for you) for an after-dinner munchable than something really bad for us. So I took 3 of the bulbs of garlic and 2 of my nice ramekin dishes and tried this recipe. In one dish I put the recipe you see below, using 2 bulbs of garlic in case my experimental dish didn’t turn out well. In the other experimental dish I put one bulb of garlic and used bacon grease instead of olive oil, keeping the rest of the recipe the same.

This was just beautiful. We could cut a slit in the skin of the garlic bulbs and squeeze the garlic cloves right out. They spread on the toast just like butter. ‘Twas glorious. Yum. The bacon grease one didn’t really taste any different from the ones using olive oil, Jake said. He says he thinks that’s because it’s a huge bulb of garlic and how could you taste anything else? Haha!

Roasted Garlic

2 garlic bulbs
3 tablespoons water
3 tablespoons olive oil
sprig of rosemary
sprig of thyme
1 bay leaf
salt (to taste)
black pepper (to taste)

1. Preheat the oven to 375 F.
2. Place the garlic bulbs in a small ovenproof dish. Drizzle with the oil and water.
3. Add the rosemary, thyme, and bay leaf and sprinkle with salt and pepper.
4. Cover with foil and bake for 30 minutes.
5. Remove the foil. Baste the garlic heads with the juices from the dish and return to oven.
6. Bake another 15-20 minutes or until they feel soft when pressed.

The recipe in the book suggests that these are served with goat cheese mixed with fresh herbs and crispy fried french bread. We didn’t have goat cheese at home but we did have a really lovely nine-grain bread. So Jake toasted (not fried, because we wanted to be healthier) some slices in our little toaster oven to spread the garlic on.

After the oven.

We’ll be leaving to go camping for a couple days on Thursday so I won’t be posting for a bit. But as a teaser I’ll tell you that Jake is going to make his super-famous and delicious Campfire Onions, including two that we’re going all crazy-experimental on (at the moment we’re talking introducing bacon into one and beer into the other, you’ll have to wait and see).