Measure Free Hippie Cook

Garlic Memories from Hippie Kitchen

18 March 2010 by Jean Johnson

It’s an exciting time to be on the American culinary journey. We’ve certainly had twists and turns and all manner of steep grades, with the path getting downright mired in some pretty strange places over the years. Think: SAD (Standard American Diet)

Here’s a bit of my own story that I included in Hippie Kitchen (page 81) so people just coming to the world of real food might know that most of us have been newbies in our time. So here’s the vid, or if you’d rather just read the page, scroll on down.

It was a spring day at Spaceway—Safeway if you must—back in the 1980s in Flagstaff, Arizona. There was this nice looking couple on the taller side, quiet as they waited in the checkout line, carrying themselves with a comportment that caught my eye. The fresh garlic and lemons they held in their hands looked like sedate jewels that only the
privileged got to enjoy.

I felt chagrined over the garlic powder and plastic bottle of faux lemon juice back in my kitchen. Worse, I fretted that someone like me not only wouldn’t take the time to use fresh ingredients, they probably wouldn’t taste the difference if they did. I turned away from the well-heeled couple and tossed a couple candy bars in my basket.

Yet I wasn’t a complete stranger to the world of real garlic and well remembered my mother making her own garlic oil for her Caesar salads. She had a bottle just the right size to contain some oil, and she’d put several cloves of peeled garlic in before letting it steep in the cool safety of the refrigerator.

So it was that somewhere along the line after my epiphany at Spaceway, I started buying fresh garlic to make garlic butter for sourdough bread. These days, I think nothing of mincing up a clove of garlic for soups and salads. There’s almost always a bulb or two sitting out handy where I slice and dice. That plus some braids hanging about from the winter crop.

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