Slow. Roast Garlic.

The kitchen is a roller-coaster of existential victories, and angst.

Often I feel overwhelmed with the weight of responsibility of a fine ingredient. As I hold it, I feel a definite sense of Don't. Mess. Up--.

It's a perfect [goose or char or yellow beet], don't mess it up.

And this isn't only in fits of self-loathing. I'm simply very aware that there's bit of perfection in my hands. There's a lot I can do wrong, whilst the only right I can perform is to preserve its integrity, or nudge it to make manifest its hidden beauty.

Yet at other times, I feel as though I created the perfection.

I'm not blind to the heresy of this. But I tell you, it's a ticket into heaven nonetheless.

Just now, as I write this, I'm making bread. The dough is in a process that's enormously dynamic--bubbling, transformational--and I'm metres away from it, as I will be for the rest of day. Yet with the loaf in my hands, I will feel I. made. bread.

Roast garlic shall never strike me with the same power, and really, in the end, nothing shall. Nonetheless, there's was a bit of magic here too. It is the first time it came to me that I might roast garlic in the slow cooker. Necessity was the mother of my invention: all the usual heat sources taken up with other things. And voila.

I didn't make the garlic gene, I didn't grow the garlic bulb, I didn't invent the slow cooker, surely I'm not the first to put them together. But somehow it registers as though I had. And how perfectly!

****

These were roast for a soup. But they are lovely spread on bread or such.
Heads of garlic, root-end intact, tops nipped.
Thin drizzle of olive oil.
A slow cooker.
A few hours.

Comments

[Szerelem]

SO beautiful.

Was your kitchen smelling garlicky for days after?

[Tori]

It might have been garlicky for days, though a decidedly mellow garlic, but we then started roasting peppers like mad, and with it I fear the whole street turned to charred sweet red good hungry scent.