garlic storage

[Guest guest]

By the way, regarding garlic, I'm sure you already know this, but garlic

doesn't need to be

refrigerated. I use a whole lot of it, too, and just buy a bulb or two whenever

I go to the

store. There are garlic keeper containers you can get for the pantry -- terra

cotta bowls

with holes in them upside down over a terra cotta glazed saucer -- to keep them

from

sprouting and away from light, and dry. But I use so much of it that they don't

usually get

a chance to start growing, anyway, so I keep them in a little glass dish in the

window over

the sink -- for easy access. You can smush the cloves and the paper comes

right off.

Just brush it away. Or, if you don't like to get it on your hands, stores like

Sur Le Table et

& Sonoma have rubbery sleeves about the size of a small manicotti. You

just put

the cloves in there and roll it between your palms and the paper falls right

out! So, I think

pre-depapering the garlic and stuffing the naked cloves into a plastic container

is a ploy to

use up a lot of garlic unnecessarily. Once it's in the refrigerator, it's been

my experience

that the flavor changes drastically within a week or two, and the cloves get

limp, and it just

lacks vitality. Pretty soon it's so rancid that you HAVE to throw it out. I

wouldn't get a big

jar of it like that unless I was making spaghetti sauce for several batallions

of infantry.

BTW -- Living in California, as I have most of my life, I have been through the

garlic capital

of the nation (if not the world) and home of the famed " Farms, "

many times:

Gilroy, California, If I remember right, it's about 30-ish miles or so south of

San (sort

of), just south of The southernmost part of the San Francisco Bay, and inland

(from the

Pacific) about 60 miles or so, just on the other side of the coastal range, and

at the mouth

of a pass that leads through the hills toward Central Valley. There, the

farmers of the

region bring their garlic. And there are a number of long, low buildings I'd

imagine to be

garlic processing plants, and packaging plants. . . . . Silicon Valley, I think,

is expanding

south now, into that region, too, but there is still the lonely feel to the

region of the

misplaced cowboy . . . the feel of trucks, and horns, and overnight motels,

and the air is

rich with the fragrance of garlic! A place in transition, an interesting place

to travel

through, with one or two fairly decent mom-and-pop restaurants still there

catering to the

traveling motorist. A good place for a slice-of-America movie by the Coen

Brothers. I

think of Gilroy whenever people mention garlic.