Strawberries 'n' Scapes

Well, at least yesterday wasn't boring. In fact, so much happened that I had a hard time narrowing down the post. Do I write a whole post about how much I hate hilling those damn potatoes, and oh my God, I think my wrist is broken from using the hoe for hours? No, no one needs to hear that much bitching. (But I'll bitch some more anyway--I HATE HILLING THOSE DAMN POTATOES AND MY WRIST IS BROKEN.) Do I write a whole post about how the two ewes were milling around eating day lilies when I got home from picking strawberries and I put them in two different pastures, twice, and they escaped from both pastures, at which point I yelled obscenities and locked them in the dog pen? Nope, because apparently, that can all be explained in one hideously written run-on sentence.

In the end, I decided to talk some more about food, because really, almost all of my day yesterday was devoted to food in some way. I hilled the aforementioned damn potatoes, I picked strawberries, I made strawberry jam, I hilled some more damn potatoes, I snapped off all the garlic scapes, and I made pesto. With the garlic scapes.

Garlic scapes are a big fad now. I know this because The New York Times had a feature on them in their food section this week. This means if you sell garlic scapes at a farmers market anywhere in the tri-state area, you can double your prices because now that The New York Times has endorsed them, they must be worth eating and everyone will want them.

But I am allowing my contempt of The New York Times to interfere with my point, which is that garlic scapes seem to be appearing all over the food world recently. And we're jumping on the bandwagon here at Blackrock because we like to follow the recommendations in The New York Times with sheeplike devotion (geddit? Sheeplike? I slay me.). And also, we have a huge bed of garlic that has produced a vast number of scapes.

If you're not a foodie (which I am not) and don't know what garlic scapes are (which I did not), they're the flowering part of a hard-stemmed garlic plant. They look sort of like green onions, with curlicues, but they taste like garlic for sure. They're milder than garlic cloves, though I still wouldn't recommend eating them raw. (I will not be eating any new foods raw from the garden ever again.)

You can see in the picture that they're bizarrely curly. It looks like Dr. Seuss food. You're supposed to remove them so the plant will expend its energy on the bulb and not the flower. So I did. And I ended up with a LOT of scapes. We have some elephant garlic, and those bad boys make some seriously jumbo-sized scapes. Enough for a whole lotta pesto. Which was a disturbingly bright green, and yet delicious. But that still only used a small fraction of the scapes that I harvested, so I'm going to have to get creative here.

Tonight I think we're going to have ribs with stir-fried scapes, and I'll process a bunch of scapes with olive oil for freezing, but I'm still going to have a daunting number of scapes left. So what would YOU do with a month's supply of garlic scapes?