First, A (mild) disclaimer…
With that said and out of the way, here is my blog, whose quality I am suspicious of. Its central topic is garlic, and it is a food and recipe blog because I really like food and recipe blogs, but I feel there aren’t enough (or any that I can find at least) that are devoted to the most wonderful, pungent, and repellant lily ever to grace the bountiful green-ish Earth, Allium sativum.
My grandpa absolutely loves garlic, and I absolutely love my grandpa. When I was little, I used to associate the musty, kind of sour, kind of sweet smell emanating from my grandpa with dentures, oil-paint, and hats, and I still do. But now I also associate the wafting smells of my grandpa to garlic and the odors created by ingesting garlic in the not-so-distant past. They’re not exactly pleasant aromas, but in some twisted, nostalgic way, I revel them.
In his life time, my grandpa has collected some, for lack of a better word, interesting books. He is an artist of eclectic mediums, from pastels to fruit peels, and he has acquired an equally diverse library of books, from a collection of naked baby photographs (not in a perverted sense) to a multitude of cookbooks and Farside anthologies, which is where I draw my inspiration for this blog… The cookbooks, not the naked babies or Farsides.
This morning, while I was eating cereal, I began perusing an older cookbook that my mom nicked from my grandpa several years ago,The Garlic Cookbook by David DiResta. When I was a wee pup, I remember my grandpa was obsessed with this cookbook, largely because he was obsessed with garlic (hence the acrid Grandpa-musk).
In this book I learned that garlic not only clings to your palate and therefore breath, but its aroma is also emitted through your pores (which I’m assuming mingles with and is increased by your sweat, further discouraging the consumption of garlic on ‘promising’ dinner dates). This is due to garlic’s containing diallyl sulfide, “a sulfur compound that is activated by contact with oxygen and permeates the lung tissue” (hence why mints, mouthwash, and brushing your teeth post-garlic feasts only make small dents in the facade of the powerhouse that is “garlic breath”).
Don’t get me wrong, this is a great cookbook from the early nineties (though it looks like it was published in the seventies and has since been updated) filled with delicious recipes and quirky garlic facts; however, most of the recipes are quite unhealthy, despite the vast quantities of health-promoting garlic used in them. So without having read the 2000 version of The Garlic Cookbook, I am setting out to update the 1994 edition with healthier and more eco-friendly recipes for Guys and Gals, chicks and dudes of the double-digit-millennium (a.k.a. 2010) that keep their mind’s eye on what they’re consuming. With that said, a huge chunk of the book has to be omitted entirely, since it deals with recipes containing veal, pork, lamb, and certain fish.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m no veggie, and I love (lovelove!) meat, but it’s not very good for you or the animals it comes from. And I must add that I really don’t like PETA (fucking extremists), but I do like animals, so I don’t eat much meat simply because it’s not very good for you in vast quantities, which is the way it is ingested in the US today. I try to eat meat keeping in mind the diets of hunter-gatherers, which we humans originally were (now we’re pretty much only consumers). They had to actually track, hunt, catch, kill, and (sometimes) cook the meat they ate, which didn’t happen everyday, let alone every week. The rest of the time they sustained on plants, berries, fruits, grasses, nuts, seeds, fish, whathaveyou. So I try to eat in a similar manner, and it makes me happy because when I’m squatting down, rummaging through my fridge’s crisper looking for berries and greens, I picture myself dirtier and more unkempt than I already am, wearing a lion cloth, picking berries from twigs like a cave man. Which makes me smile and love my chosen everyday diet. Because I love being naked, and loin cloths are a close second.
With this blog I hope to inspire more people to smell like my grandpa as well as eat healthier, garlic-rich, diets while wearing loin cloths and rarely bathing. It is a beautiful, smelly world I envision, and I seek to create it by posting at least one new-ish, healthy, garlic-laden recipe each week, along with some sweet facts and anecdotes.
I really hope that my other entries won’t be as long as this one.
For now,
Terry
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