Week Four finds us with a possible break in the rain, the 4th of July, the opening of the Duxbury Farmer's Market and the following basket mix: Pak Choi, Swiss Chard, "Elegance" greens mix, Baby Kale, Broccoli Rapa, free-range eggs, hand-craft soap and Garlic Scapes (slight variation may occur between monday CSAs & friday CSAs).
If you have not made it to a local farmer's market yet, you may discover a new American pass time, very family-friendly and reminscint of halcyon days... Here's a peek. Happy 4th!
From French country cuisine to the brautmasters of Germany to even us Swamp Yankees of Plymouth County, there has been a long standing opinion in cooking, that there is no waste in the hard-earned reward of food.
Just as snails are flavored with garlic and meat scraped to the bone to make sausages, the economy of the traditional harvest continues today. "We shall waste no part of the animal," Peter Straub once observed. ...Or plant!
I cannot recount how many times my grandfather from Madeira practiced this belief, knawing on trotters (pickled pigs feet) or the turkey's gizard and anus - all the while stating as fact their delicacy.
Well we don't have to go to quite that extreme to illustrate this week's true delicacy: garlic scapes.
Pictured here are the wrangled snarls of the "waste" of the garlic plant. Technically, garlic scapes are the flower & seed stem, which twist into a bizarrely beautiful coil prior to blossoming. Garlic farms routinely cut down the stem at this point as it directs the growth energy of the plant into the bulb rather than the foliage and blossom. A 30-35% increase in the bulb yeild can be managed by this method.
Cooking of scapes is very easy and the flavor is not as intense as the bulb itself. If you have never had scapes before, you will truly find them to be a "new" delicacy, but enjoy them while they last, because they are VERY, VERY seasonal.
