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So, we seem to be sharing LA's "reverse spring" or whatever. It's gotten way cooler, down to like 9 C. Same cool period as started Sunday. I'm not complaining, 9 sure beats 29. But it's weird. June!
My cooking with fresh garlic has always been curbed by the process of peeling the cloves. Squeeze or mash, get the skin off with some effort, get your fingers sticky... well, I recently saw a trick, which actually works pretty well. Drop a whole head into a Mason jar, and shake for like 20 seconds. The head breaks up, and the skin starts to come off the cloves. I've been doing it in stages: shake till the head breaks up, dump out and remove the loose 'paper', dump back in and shake, dump out and remove the naked cloves and 'paper', shake the remainder... I find that they don't *all* turn naked, but a lot of those that don't turn out to be pretty loose, so you can do the final removal easily. Helps if the part where they were all connected is removed, I think.
It's easy enough that after adding the last remaining cloves to my rice, and breaking up a new head, I decided to fry and add all those cloves, and break up *another* new head to keep in the fridge. On that last one, a few small cloves needed old-fashioned peeling, but that's like 2 out of 15. Also small enough that they could have been thrown away with little loss.
I've been cooking more with Indian spices. Cumin, cardamon, ginger, large quantities. For the rice, I tried frying powder in butter and oil, vs. just dumping it into the rice-and-water. I still don't know what I'm doing, but it does make black beans more interesting.
My cooking with fresh garlic has always been curbed by the process of peeling the cloves. Squeeze or mash, get the skin off with some effort, get your fingers sticky... well, I recently saw a trick, which actually works pretty well. Drop a whole head into a Mason jar, and shake for like 20 seconds. The head breaks up, and the skin starts to come off the cloves. I've been doing it in stages: shake till the head breaks up, dump out and remove the loose 'paper', dump back in and shake, dump out and remove the naked cloves and 'paper', shake the remainder... I find that they don't *all* turn naked, but a lot of those that don't turn out to be pretty loose, so you can do the final removal easily. Helps if the part where they were all connected is removed, I think.
It's easy enough that after adding the last remaining cloves to my rice, and breaking up a new head, I decided to fry and add all those cloves, and break up *another* new head to keep in the fridge. On that last one, a few small cloves needed old-fashioned peeling, but that's like 2 out of 15. Also small enough that they could have been thrown away with little loss.
I've been cooking more with Indian spices. Cumin, cardamon, ginger, large quantities. For the rice, I tried frying powder in butter and oil, vs. just dumping it into the rice-and-water. I still don't know what I'm doing, but it does make black beans more interesting.