Roasted Garlic

Garlic is one of my favorite things to eat. And it’s good for you too.

According to the Cleveland Clinic, it boosts immunity, works as an anti-inflammatory and improves heart health. They say it can also help with acne and athletes foot, but fortunately I haven’t had to rely on garlic as a cure for either one of those things. I still have flashbacks and night terrors from when my grandmother fed me onion juice as a child to ward off colds and flu. It absolutely worked, but only because no one would come near me and it’s really hard to catch a cold when the nearest person is 50 feet away. So yeah, I’m not interested in rubbing garlic on myself and then trying to find people who want to hang with me. Hard pass on that, but you do you, Cleveland Clinic.

I feel like any savory recipe I make has at least some garlic in it, but my absolute favorite way to prepare and eat garlic is to roast it. Roasting garlic takes the “edge” off of it, so it’s not so aggressively strong and it also makes it easier to digest. It also makes it spectacularly versatile.

I love to use it in everything from sauces to soups to entrees. You can check it out in my recipes for Garlic Lemon Sauce

This can be used either cold or in hot dishes to add a garlicky creaminess, or even as a marinade.

I also love to add it to eggplant to make a super tasty dip in my http://roasted garlic and eggplant

It is the perfect touch to mellow out the earthy acorn squash in this tasty soup Acorn Squash Soup with Pears and Ginger

And it really spruces up rice which can be rather bland in my entree Brussel Sprouts, Cauliflower and Brown Rice in Garlic Sauce

So if you haven’t tried roasted garlic, you don’t know what you are missing. I even use it as a spread on my bread instead of using butter, and bonus, the oil you store it in can be used as garlic oil to cook other things in! It’s a total win-win! It keeps in the fridge in an airtight container for 1-2 weeks, so you can make a batch and keep it awhile. I typically put it in a mason jar which I get from my local grocery store, but you can buy them at a variety of places including Walmart, Target, and of course, Amazon. Craft stores also carry them, and I am lucky enough to have a local hardware store that sells them as well.

But back to the bread. If you haven’t used roasted garlic as a spread, you don’t know what you are missing. It is absolutely delicious and elevated a piece of plain old bread to a work of culinary art.

Below is the recipe for roasted garlic. Bon Appetite!

Ingredients:

1 or more heads of garlic
olive oil

Directions:

Heat oven to 350.
Cut the tops off of the garlic heads. No need to peel the garlic at all.

3. Put the garlic in an oven proof dish or place each individual head on a square of foil and drizzle with olive oil. Just enough to coat the tops of the cut cloves.

4. If using a dish, cover tightly with a lid or foil. If using the squares of foil, fold each one up tightly around the garlic head. Roast for 30-45 minutes or till soft but not mushy when gently squeezed. Don’t squeeze too hard since you don’t want to crush up the individual cloves. You want them to remain whole when you separate them. Remove from oven, uncover and allow to cool a bit before you squeeze the cloves out. I squeeze them directly into a mason jar.