The Straggler
Today I'm cooking with a mystery plant from our garden.
Misplaced leaves started shooting up in the corner of a random vegetable bed over Winter. At first I thought it was a volunteer rattlesnake master seeded from our prairie garden, later I guessed rogue flower bulb that somehow didn’t break down in the compost. Then the weather warmed and we finally came to understand what it was because of a pungent armpit smell: elephant garlic. It grew a scape last week, thick and tough and fibrous as a tree branch, a sure sign the cloves are ready to eat.
Since the leaves haven’t died back yet, it isn’t fully bulbed. But that’s not such a bad thing when it comes to garlic this big, which can be difficult to pry apart. It took my full body weight to yank the dang thing out of the ground! Last year’s cloves were shrunken, clinging on at the roots and probably storing energy to make more plants. Is garlic perennial if you don’t harvest it? I asked E. He doesn’t know. I love that it still retains an air of mystery, I told him. I can’t begin to comprehend how this one giant flew under the radar last Summer when I was all about garlic all the time for weeks.
Tonight I’ll grate a monster clove into a mixture of sesame paste, Sichuan sweet soy sauce, black vinegar, Sichuan peppercorns and chili crisp for noodles in strange flavor sauce, 怪味面. Per usual, I don’t have the right noodles so sweet potato noodles from my fav Korean grocery store will have to suffice. I’ll top them with baby scallions and shredded cabbage from the garden, plus some crispy tofu baked in oil, nutritional yeast and mushroom seasoning. On the side, a raspberry lime Spindrift.