Garlic Scapes for Dinner

by Cynthia

The other night I made our first real meal from the garden for this growing season and let me tell you it was so good! Some of you may remember that I planted a ridiculously large amount of garlic last year. (What can I say? We really like garlic in this house.) Well, all that garlic has been busy producing scapes. A scape is the technical name for the flower stalk that garlic will produce. It is important to remove the scape to encourage the garlic to put its energy towards growing the bulb- not a flower.

A few days ago I went out to the garlic patch armed with a basket prepared to snap off all those garlic scapes that were twisting and turning in a strange way towards the sun. I knew exactly what I was going to do with them too.

Garlic Scapes

While blog surfing one night I came across the most delicious sounding recipe using garlic scapes. I was incredibly excited too seeing that I had so many scapes to try and figure out what to do with. The recipe was for a super simple garlic scape pesto. I just used the recipe as a guide and pretty much did my own thing. You can find the original recipe at the always hunger provoking blog, In the Kitchen and on the Road with Dorie.

What I did was roughly chop a large handful of my freshly plucked garlic scapes- probably around 30 or so. They went into my food processor along with 1 cup of slivered almonds and roughly 1 cup of freshly grated parmesan cheese. I then turned on the food processor and let it chop up those three ingredients. Then I gradually added about 1 ¼ cups extra virgin olive oil while the machine was still running. Once the olive oil was nice and mixed in I tossed the pesto with some just cooked and still hot pasta.

Garlic Scape Pesto

This was by far one of the best dishes I have made in awhile. Everyone devoured it and was sad to see it gone. My husband called it our once a year dinner and declared it extra special because the garlic scapes are here and then they are gone. They do not keep producing like tomatoes do. One must truly savor this dish as you will not see it again until next year.

Now that we have had our first official meal from the garden I cannot wait for the zucchinis, beans, tomatoes, corn….I am getting hungry as I type!

Prior to making the garlic scape pesto I had really only thought to use the scapes in stir fries or salads. This recipe really opened some doors for me when it comes to using them in dishes. Have you found any interesting uses for garlic scapes? If so I would love to hear about them.

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