Roast Garlic and a Belated Anniversary

I just realised that yesterday was A Pot of Tea and a Biscuit's first anniversary. I can't believe it (not that I missed it, because I'm quite good at missing things), but the fact that it has been a year since I wrote my first post. I don't think I thought back then that I'd really get into this whole blogging thing myself, and I certainly didn't think that there would be over 13,000 visits to my blog and nearly 60 people reading my ramblings in their Google Reader on a regular basis. So, thank you, each and everyone of you, whether you are just lurking or whether you leave comments, without all of you it'd only be half the fun!

Onto the food now though....

I love roasted garlic. It's great for using in all sorts of dishes. However, I like it best just as it is, squeezed straight onto some fresh crusty bread. Heavenly. Some of you might think that it must be awfully strong, but believe me when I say that roasting it makes it wonderfully mellow and brings out a lovely sweetness, just like slow cooking onions does.

Most recipes I know call for a huge amount of olive oil to roast the garlic in, which makes it somewhat 'unhealthy' (I know, I know, some olive oil in your diet is actually really good for you). So, this recipe replaces most of the oil with vegetable stock and in my opinion the garlic tastes just as great and it is the recipe I always use these days. You can roast as many bulbs as you like at once, the large elephant garlic bulbs work great, but standard bulbs work just as well.



Roast Garlic

2-3 bulbs of garlic
vegetable stock
olive oil
6 sprigs of thyme

Cut the tops off the garlic bulbs, just enough that the tops of the individual cloves are taken off. (You can keep the cut-offs and use them minced in another dish.)

Place the bulbs in a small oven proof dish, top each one with a couple of sprigs of thyme and drizzle with a little olive oil.

Pour enough stock into the dish to come up to about 1/3 of the bulbs.

Cover with some tin foil and bake in a pre-heated oven at about 160C/325F/Gas 3, for about an hour.