I have days where creating a full family meal from scratch sounds daunting. I may have been busy in the garden, or doing taxes, or embarking on spring cleaning, and then the dinner hour begins to approach and I know I need to get busy in the kitchen.
There are a couple of specific kitchen tasks that I just don't like doing in the moment. Dealing with our garden garlic is one of those. I have to clean the cloves, peel them, and then chop. It's just a tedious chore I don't enjoy. Evidently, the rest of my family doesn't particularly enoy this task when they're cooking, either. As a result, I found myself buying garlic powder often this past winter. And yet, we have oodles of garden garlic remaining from last season.
So today I set out to prep several heads of garlic to make all of our cooking just a teensy bit easier. In addition to saving effort on a daily basis, I save a little money, too. I've often wanted to buy minced garlic in a jar. A 4.5 oz jar sells for about $2 at Walmart. That much home-grown garlic costs under 10 cents in water during the growing season. (I replant cloves saved from the previous harvest, so no cost for the "seed" garlic.) Save effort, save money. And by doing a large batch at once, I save a little time per clove.
On Monday I checked the garlic stored in the fridge and saw we still had a lot to go through before the next harvest. It was time to do something and get us to use this in the coming months.
I just grabbed a handful of heads of garlic, about enough for 3 weeks of meals in our house.
After pulling all of the cloves off each head, I rubbed them between my hands to loosen the papery skins.
It took me about 20 to 30 minutes to peel all of the cloves.
Once done, I filled almost a half pint jar with peeled cloves. I had a thought to just leave the cloves whole, but peeled in the jar. But I've had peeled cloves of garlic go soft within a few weeks. So I put all of the cloves through the garlic press.
Once all minced I had about a half-cup of ready to use garlic.
To maintain its fresh flavor, minced garlic can store in the freezer for several months. So I scooped all of the garlic into a small bag, pressed it flat, and lightly scored the slab. Popping the bag into the freezer, I made sure it froze flat. Having the garlic mass flat and lightly scored just makes its easier to break off meal-sized pieces. Unlike jarred garlic, with freezing minced garlic, there is no need to add anything for preservation.
I now have a slight head start when cooking meals from scratch, and I'm pretty sure we'll go through all of our garden garlic in time. I'll need to do this in additional batches as we finish off what I have frozen. But I'd rather do a large batch every few weeks than deal with individual garlic cloves on a daily basis.
Is there any ingredient that you like to prep in advance in large batches? Have you ever made your own convenience products? In the 80s and 90s making Bisquick-style baking mixes was popular. I tried that a few times. It worked well. i just don't use Bisquick often enough to make a home version. I do make cake mixes occasionally. Not that we eat a lot of cake, but homemade cake mixes last 6 to 12 months when stored properly. A 3-cake batch of cake mix is easy enough for us to go through in a year, with birthdays and all.
