Foods I've Been Obsessing Over

Italian pink garlic. A few weeks ago, Aaron and I succumbed to the charms of a container of pre-peeled garlic from Costco. I'd always objected before; something about it kind of creeped me out. Being fall, I've been making lots of soup, and therefore using lots of garlic. I hate peeling garlic. I like it when the skin comes off nicely in one satisfying piece, but that so rarely happens and I usually end up picking little tiny shards of impossible-to-grip paper off the clove. So we tried the Costco stuff, and for a while it was pretty groovy. I didn't immediately notice any off-flavors in anything, and the convenience factor was pretty great. Then the garlic on the bottom of the container started molding, so I threw it out and bought some fresh garlic. The minute I cracked a clove I swore I'd never complain about peeling garlic again. While that probably isn't true, I will definitely never buy pre-peeled garlic again. Fresh garlic, and this Italian pink garlic from PCC in particular, has a much more complex aroma and taste than the pre-peeled stuff. The switch really made the differences clear. The peeled stuff smelled and tasted like garlic, but in a very one-note way, almost like bad garlic breath. The fresh garlic smelled, well, fresh, earthy, spicy, sweet and sharp, just so so fragrant and lovely. Anna introduced me to this fig spread, and I can't stop eating it. It's fantastic on crackers with blue cheese or goat cheese or mascarpone cheese, any kind of cheese that has a sharp bite to it. I love fresh figs, but when they're out of season or you want a richer figgy flavor, this spread is it. It takes the mild creaminess of fresh figs and makes it all fancy and mellow and a lot richer, deeply sweet like brown sugar or maple syrup, but not too sugary. Lately I've been eating it with plain yogurt, and for once I prefer low-gat yogurt to whole milk. The whole milk yogurt is too mellow and doesn't provide enough tang as a counterpoint to the darkness of the fig spread. Still, somehow I managed to power through an entire quart of whole milk yogurt and am making rapid progress on the container of the low-fat stuff. Squash. It's becoming a sickness, almost. I can't seem to make it out of the grocery store without at least one kind of squash in my cart, usually acorn or butternut. The little striped ones are the last of the delicata from our garden, the butternut is fresh from PCC. I find something different to love about each kind of squash and keep finding new ways to serve it; roasted with chicken and cranberries, cut into thin strips and made into 'fries,' cut in half and stuffed with quinoa and sausage, simply steamed and served with butter and brown sugar and once by accident goat cheese, which was delicious. That big beautiful butternut may well find its way into a soup this very night, as I have some creme fraiche in my fridge and few things in this life are lovelier than squash soup with creme fraiche. All this obsessing over my food sometimes leaves little time for other things, like cleaning. I hate, hate cooking in a dirty kitchen and always prepare my work space before cooking, but after cooking my kitchen often looks like this. We had company last night and I opted to visit after dinner rather than do the dishes. Jack has school today, so the kitchen will be my afternoon project. Plus I need to make a batch of chocolate chocolate-chip cookies to test a recipe I'm working on and I need at least one clean counter top.