I still have a lot of garlic from last year’s harvest. So to make sure I get through it all before the new crop comes in, I have increased my consumption. Thanks to this project, I’ve been cooking garlic as if it’s a vegetable, rather than a spice.
And given that garlic is plant material, but not a fruit or nut, it isn’t wrong to call it a vegetable, even if we usually use it as a spice. It’s also an herb, believe it or not. We normally think of herbs as leafy plants, and while it may not look like it, a clove of garlic is actually an entire plant. The white fleshy part that we eat is a modified leaf, while the plant’s root and stem are confined to the scabby thing on the bottom of the clove. The center of that structure is the stem, and the bulbous ring around the stem is a set of baby roots. But the majority of the clove is technically a leaf.
