A little over a week ago Jeff harvested all the garlic in our garden. (I shared about the varieties we planted in this post from the fall, and the garlic is from Salty Dog Farm.) Before that we harvested all the garlic scapes. The timing worked out well because we needed the beds that the garlic was in to plant some summer squash and beans. I made garlic scape pesto for the first time and it turned out delicious. I discovered that it wasn’t a good idea to make the pesto in our blender, though, because our blender suddenly stopped working. When it turned off I was worried I had broken our expensive blender that we had waited years to get. I almost went outside in search of Jeff in the garden, to tell him the bad news and hope that he could work his magic and fix it (since he comes to the rescue so often around here and fixes everything), but then I searched online and discovered that our blender had overheated and would work again after it cooled down.

I was so relieved about that! Apparently when you try to blend something that is too thick, and you do it on a low speed, Vitamix blenders can overheat and will shut off to protect themselves. We switched to using the food processor instead to finish up the pesto because even when I added more liquid to make it easier to blend, it was still too thick for the blender. I’ve made basil pesto in our blender with no problem, but we learned the garlic scape pesto was best done in the food processor. I want to write down what I did so that next year, when we harvest garlic scapes again, I can make more. I used a little over 40 garlic scapes, 2 cups olive oil, 2/3 cup sunflower seeds, and the juice of two lemons. (I told you I added a lot of liquid!) I froze nine small jars of it, and we’ve already eaten a few up. Next time I would add more sunflower seeds, but regardless of tweaking the consistency a bit, the flavor was simply amazing and has tasted good with every meal I’ve served it with. I will definitely be making garlic scape pesto again!

I know I’ve been talking all about the garlic scapes, but we’re very excited about the garlic too! Jeff and I are crazy about garlic, and Bracken will ask for loads of it when it’s roasted. Nothing makes me hungrier at mealtime than the smell of garlic! Recently I tried baking garlic a new way, like in this post. (I used coconut oil instead of olive oil, and instead of using aluminum foil to wrap them, I simply put the garlic in a glass baking dish that had a lid and it was nice and steamy inside and didn’t dry out.) It was wonderful to not have to peel all of the garlic and to have the cloves squeeze right out. It’s my new favorite way to make roasted garlic now. Many of you probably already roast your garlic that way, but I thought I would share in case you were like me and it’s a new discovery.

Our garlic is all drying right now, I can’t wait to eat some! My dad helped us get the garlic beds ready to plant when he visited in the fall, and we’ll be sharing some garlic with my dad and stepmom next time we see them. If you have any favorite recipes involving garlic (or garlic scapes- inspiration for the next time we have more), please share, it’s about to become even more garlic crazy around our kitchen than usual.