A Garlic for All (One-Third) Season

There are certain things that, no matter how global the food supply chain is, appear only briefly during the year. In that category is immature green garlic, with colorful stalks somewhere between scallions and leeks. The taste is amazing, enhanced no doubt by the fact that they are only available for about 4 weeks each year.

I try to take advantage of this short, growing season, buying up cases of the stuff, to the chagrin of friends and family who don’t seem to have an unlimited capacity for garlic in its various guises. My preference is green garlic soup or creamed green garlic, but for the sake of domestic peace and tranquility, I find all sorts of other ways to sneak it in. The creamed spinach that comes out of our soul food kitchen on a regular basis gets a big ooomph from the garlic, but I digress.

My problem here is that I push the outside edge of the seasonal envelope too far, continuing to prepare green garlic even after the wonderfully tender stalks start to dry up. The taste is still there, but the consistency gets to be too chewy and I know that and yet I still charge ahead with the stubbornness and determination that somehow, this time, it will work out alright. It doesn’t. I’m left with a very chewy dish that I need to figure out what to do with. Which I do, invariably, but that’s not really the point, is it?

More to the point is how explain one’s insistence on going down on a certain road knowing full well from past experience that it’s a dead end? Habit? For the sake of tradition? A sense that hope springs eternal (which may be true but spring itself in this case is not, eternal that is).? It’s probably some combination of all these rationale, although I like this last one the best: The sense that no matter how much things didn’t work out beforehand, this time by god, it’s going to be different.