The Great Garlic Saga

Have you ever bought groceries that were on “manager’s special”? In my experience, manager’s special is either an awesome deal or a disgusting waste of money. As a somewhat spoiled food snob, I tend to prefer my food to be as fresh as possible but most manager’s specials are things that are close to being thrown out. But I have found a couple of items that seem to be a good deal. Not too long ago, I bought a bag of roma tomatoes for only a dollar. I blended them up and used them in chili and they were great but I probably would not have wanted to just slice them up and eat them. Also, my grocery store often has “reduced” bananas for only $.29 per pound. I know, I know, bananas are inexpensive as it is but my family eats a TON of them! The “reduced” ones are often very ripe or bruised but they are perfect for freezing to use in smoothies.

My most recent manager’s special snag was an entire bag of garlic for one dollar. So, I pick up my bag of garlic and the rest of my grocery list items and head to the check out. The cashier asks me “how long will it take you to use all of this garlic?” In my head I was thinking “you call that a lot of garlic?” but she did spark a valid thought – how long do I have to use this garlic before it goes bad?

When I got home, I turned to the trusty internet for ways to preserve my $1 garlic investment. The best solution that I found to match my mound of

garlic that was probably already at the edge of it’s useful life was to freeze it in olive oil. The particular site I was reading claimed that the olive oil will prevent the garlic from freezing solid so you can just scoop out what you need and be on your way. Perfect!

And so began my never ending date with garlic. I’m pretty sure it took like six days straight to break apart each head of garlic, then peal each individual clove, and finally slice off the dry end that was attached to the stem. For some reason, I was feeling less and less like this was a dollar well spent. At each stage, I was thinning out my herd of garlic; any clove that was really bruised or had already sprouted got the boot. I was probably more particular about only keeping the best than I would normally be because I had a little paranoia going on about how long garlic has to sit at the grocery store before they put it on manager’s special…

Finally, I was ready to grind it up in my food processor. The site that gave me such great inspiration said to use a 2 to 1 ratio of oil to garlic. I did more like a 1 to 1; I had so much garlic and not so much olive oil! It was enough oil to help the garlic move smoothly in the food processor. Then off to a quart size mason jar and to the freezer. Added bonus to this adventure – Garlic Potpourri (and yes, I had to look up how to spell that)! My husband could still smell the aroma when he came home from work almost 7 hours later…

The next day, I wanted to take advantage of my fully prepped garlic! I thought this was going to be awesome, right! All I had to do was pull this jar out of the freezer, scoop out half of a tablespoon or so and straight into my pan. Wrong! Frozen solid! One dollar and about 2 hours of work and I can’t even get it out of the jar! I was finally able to get enough of it out using an ice cream scoop but I think it would have been faster to chop it fresh. Maybe next time I will used the 2 to 1 ratio of oil to garlic… Who am I kidding, there won’t be a next time!