Fun with Garlic Scapes

When Brian and I went to Caretaker Farm last week on distribution day, I was super-excited to see a big box of garlic scapes with no limit on how many we could take.  Clearly it’s a side effect of reading so many food blogs: I read all the posts about seasonal foods and get really excited when I manage to find them (or, when they manage to find me, since I didn’t really seek out the scapes, they were just sitting in the box.)

Anyway…garlic scapes are the green shoots that grow out of the middle of the garlic plant in early summer.  They have a milder flavor than garlic and a great crunch.  I love garlic and even though I had no idea how I was going to use them, I knew I had to have some.

So what did we do with all of our garlic scapes?

Whole wheat pasta with garlic scape pesto, originally based on this recipe:

White Bean and Garlic Scapes Dip, from the NY Times was a bit hit, so much so that we made 2 batches this week.  Much less strong than the pesto, Brian pronounced the dip “better than hummus” (!).  Moreover, making dip is so ridiculously easy.

In an effort to use more than 1 of our CSA items in a single meal, I made a modified version of this Black Bean Salad with Green Garlic and Scapes Pesto from Cheap Healthy Good.  Instead of using the pesto recipe, I substituted a few tablespoons  of the pesto I’d already made for the pasta.  It wasn’t quite as amazing as CHG claimed, but it was still pretty delicious–and filling.  I also added some baby turnip greens to the salad because we had much less arugula than I thought.  Side dish: roasted red potatoes, baby turnips and carrots.  My first time roasting vegetables (crazy, I know) and our first time eating turnips.  It turned out amazingly well.  So good that we grabbed more turnips this week!

Garlic scapes also made appearances in all of our salads, an omelette and probably a few other things I can’t remember.  Have I mentioned that I love garlic?

One last thing: whenever possible, eat outside.  We don’t do this nearly enough.