I have garlic breath, the natural result of consuming garlic bread. Or, perhaps to be more accurate, garlic ciabatta, which we had to accompany our simple but enjoyable dinner of stuffed pasta thingies (tortelloni?) with a nice mushroom sauce. Sometimes simple is thoroughly pleasant; not every dinner needs to be an out-and-out feast, after all.
I have what I would describe as a complicated relationship with garlic. I like a lot of things that contain garlic, and one of my most enduring memories of childhood is, oddly, being outside probably the first Italian restaurant I ever went to, and being able to smell a distinctive combination of tomato and garlic that I don't think I've ever really smelled again since. I would immediately recognise it if I smelled it again, though.
On a trip to New York one time, some friends that we met up who lived there took us to this incredible little local place that doesn't appear in any of the tourist books and invited us to try the deep-fried garlic they did there. It was delicious, even if the very prospect of deep-fried garlic sounds utterly horrifying to you. (It did to me, but I tried it anyway, and did not regret it.)
The smell, though, particularly if you're not using fresh stuff. For a while, my wife was making use of these weird frozen garlic cube things in recipes, and they smelled fucking rank when you cooked them. Same for the jar of "minced garlic" paste we have had in the fridge for quite a while now. But, strangely, the jarred, chopped garlic that I tend to use by preference when a recipe calls for garlic, doesn't bother me at all. I know some people are super sniffy about "jarlic", as it's referred to, but I guess that's my line. Jarlic is fine for me, but anything lower down the "naturality" chain than that is not. Especially not those fucking frozen cubes. I am glad we have no more of them. They made your hands stink just to touch them, even for a moment.
But yeah. There are some recipes we make semi-regularly that make use of garlic. Probably our favourite is a sort of stir-fried beef one that features a sauce made from soy sauce, mirin, beef stock and honey, plus a bit of garlic browned in the pan before the sauce is added to thicken it all up. The jarlic works great in that one.
So yeah. My relationship with garlic is… complex. Fitting, I guess, since one could argue it adds a certain "complexity" to a dish. It certainly doesn't need to be in everything. But it can be nice, once in a while, particularly when delivered in the form of garlic bread, especially if said garlic bread is topped with cheese.
Yes, that's right, today's post really was just about garlic. Hey, they can't all be winners. Sometimes I just have to go with what's on my mind (or on my breath) at any given moment, y'know…? Besides, I wrote something much more thoughtful over on MoeGamer earlier today, so go read that instead. I want to go to bed.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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