You know how I told you I loved ginger? Well, I really love garlic! The pungent little member of the onion family takes centre stage in much of our cooking. But it wasn’t always so.

I remember growing up, like most of the “Aussies” around us, with no idea about garlic or many of the other wonderful spices and herbs common in other cultures. The only foriegn food you were likely to experience was at the local Chinese take-away restuarant and most of our home meals were the old “Meat and Three Veg” with the odd roast on special occassions. Fortunately, when I was still quite young we moved into some very multicultural areas and my culinary experience exploded!

We made friends whose families came from Italy and Greece, and then others from all over Europe and the Mediteranian. Later there were others from Asia, India, South America, Africa and just about everwhere else you can think of. So you can imagine the explosion of tastes and smells that we were introduced to. It’s hard to imagine a world without this cultural and culinary diversity and richness now, and we are all the better because of it.

It’s also hard to imagine a world without garlic as it plays such a significant role in so many cultures’ cuisines and folklore. Garlic has a rich history and is reputed to reduce blood pressure, control blood sugar, fight off viral infection, improve your immune system, make you more virile, ward off evil spirits and even deter mosquitos! There’s even a garlic phobia – Alliumphobia is the term for the fear of garlic. The list goes on and on, but I just love the taste :-).

For some reason, until relatively recently, I didn’t grow much garlic. But last season I bought a few bulbs from Ceres Community Environment Park in Brunswick and set aside two small beds dedicated to this most wonderful of herbs. A few weeks ago I realised that the tops had died down a bit too much and they were well overdue to be harvested. Anyway, I got a good crop and we’re going to have really nice garlic for a while now. The cloves are a bit small but they have an intense flavour.

I noticed the other day that I must have missed a few or dropped some bulbs because I have several clusters of new season plants popping up in the old beds. I’ll leave some where they are and translplant the rest over the week and get set for another awesome crop next year.

So what prompted this little reminisce? Well, I cooked a bolognaise style pasta dish tonight and guess what one of the key ingredients was? Yep! The Aromatic Bulb of Happiness! 🙂