Roasted Garlic
Garlic has a multitude of uses in a simple kitchen: sauteed vegetables, garlic bread, hundreds of sauces and thousands of recipes rely on garlic. An Italian meal without garlic is unthinkable. A head of garlic is cheap (less than a dollar) and, thanks to its pungency, contains a surprising amount of spice. In fact, I often find that its hard to use the entire head before it has expired (about 2 weeks in a cool dry place). Garlic cloves are amazingly nutritious. They can lower cholesterol, fight cancer and kill fungal infection. (Maybe this is what our football team needs. Extra garlic at those spaghetti dinners, Rich!) Rather than wasting those left-over garlic cloves, try roasting them.
From Simply Recipes:
1 Preheat the oven to 400°F.
2 Peel away the outer layers of the garlic bulb skin, leaving the skins of the individual cloves intact. Using a knife, cut off 1/4 to a 1/2 inch of the top of cloves, exposing the individual cloves of garlic.
3 Place the garlic heads in a baking pan; muffin pans work well for this purpose. Drizzle a couple teaspoons of olive oil over each head, using your fingers to make sure the garlic head is well coated. Cover with aluminum foil. Bake at 400°F for 30-35 minutes, or until the cloves feel soft when pressed.
4 Allow the garlic to cool enough so you can touch it without burning yourself. Use a small small knife cut the skin slightly around each clove. Use a cocktail fork or your fingers to pull or squeeze the roasted garlic cloves out of their skins.
Eat as is or mash with a fork and use for cooking. Can be spread over warm French bread, mixed with sour cream for a topping for baked potatoes, or mixed in with Parmesan and pasta.
I think you’ll find that roasted garlic has a very different flavor from raw garlic (much like its close relative, the onion). Better yet, roasted garlic is, in my experience, much less likely to cause that toxic halitosis better known as ‘garlic breath.’
