Garlic Scapes for Dinner

Some of our Spanish Rosa garlic has sprouted an alien life form!

Not really — these are garlic scapes. Instead of a flower, sometimes garlic will sprout a scape, which is like an extra little bulblet on a stem. You could let that continue to grow and become tiny garlic cloves (this is how a garlic plant can go to seed), but if the plant puts its energy into the scape, the garlic bulb in the ground won't get very big. And that's really the goal.

So we cut a few of our garlic scapes last night for dinner:

These scapes are alongside a green onion and the leaves of some bok choy that has bolted (the leaves still taste fine, but there's no nice cabbage head like last fall). We also pulled our earliest carrots and chopped up a couple of overgrown radishes for this stir fry:

There's also cilantro in here from the garden. The ingredients not grown by us are the rice and pork (although the pork is from a nearby farm). This is almost a totally Made in Massachusetts dinner!

And it's really, besides salad, our first complete dinner of the summer garden. We're back in business!