Year End Garlic

Since the calendar says it's officially (almost) mid December, it's time to be focusing on Christmas preparations.  It's been a very busy fall here though, so instead of baking and decorating, today is garlic day!

Earlier this fall we planted garlic cloves and put them to bed until spring.  It's always amazing to see garlic starting to pop through once the March sun starts shining.  It's certainly one of our favourite first signs of spring!

But.....we still had a couple of baskets left from our incredible 2016 garlic harvest sitting in the kitchen for more than a few weeks needing to be dealt with.  Today is the day!

You know we like experimenting with our home grown food so after a quick internet search, we decided to give freezing garlic a try. We're hoping this means we'll be able to extend the season and have garlic cloves until we're ready to harvest again in July 2017.

First off we needed to figure out an easy way to peel the individual cloves.  Here's our tip - shake, shake, shake!

We just put heads of garlic and cloves in a glass jar and shook and shook and shook.  The result - pretty good and a lot less peeling than what we started with!

After lots of shaking and peeling, here's the end result - a big pile of cloves (and a very garlicy smelling kitchen!).

After a quick rinse, we placed the cloves into clean jars for easy freezing.  We're hoping the jars contain the garlic smell a bit....or else Christmas baking we tuck away in the freezer might appeal to different senses this year!

We'll let you know what we think over the next few months.  #loveONTfood #lovelocal