Costco's Christopher Ranch garlic with spuds, pasta

Christopher Ranch peeled California garlic cloves and skin-on sweet potatoes, both from Costco Wholesale, can be boiled together for mashing with avocado and extra-virgin olive oils, and such seasonings as cinnamon, black pepper, red-pepper flakes and a little salt.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
Editor 

Google "Can you eat too much garlic?" and you'll discover a lively Internet discussion of the many health benefits of this onion-related bulb.

You'll also find a few cautionary tales, such as "garlic breath" and a warning that garlic is a blood thinner and shouldn't be eaten in large quantities after surgery.

One food blogger mellows chopped raw garlic by blending it with butter or sour cream, neither of which I eat.

I love cooking with Christopher Ranch garlic from California that I buy at Costco Wholesale in Hackensack, and use it freely when mashing sweet potatoes and preparing pasta with oil-and-garlic.

We recently started buying the refrigerated peeled variety in 3-pound bags for $5.99 that are stamped with a "best before" date that isn't as inflexible as the one found on Earthbound Farm Organic Spring Mix.

Garlic mashed sweet potatoes and leftover baby spinach with chopped fresh garlic make great side dishes for two organic brown eggs with prepared pesto, sun-dried tomatoes, a thin slice of French-style cheese and Aleppo pepper.

Organic whole-wheat spaghetti from Whole Foods Market forms the basis of this twist on oil-and-garlic pasta with the addition of diced organic tomatoes, a can of drained and rinsed anchovies, fresh organic baby spinach, chicken stock, red wine and such seasonings as black pepper, red-pepper flakes and dried Italian herbs. I used about three dozen garlic cloves,1 pound of spaghetti and a half-pound of pre-washed spinach. Most of the ingredients were from Costco.

I enjoyed the last of the garlic sweet potatoes this morning with two fried organic brown eggs seasoned with a little salt, curry powder and shredded Parmigiano Reggiano Cheese.

Cooking with a fistful of peeled California garlic

A pound of organic baby spinach, a couple of fistfuls of peeled Christopher Ranch California Garlic, avocado and sesame oils and a few drops of soy sauce made a great side dish for spice-covered haddock fillets, below.

The leftover organic brown rice I served with the spinach and fish also was prepared with a couple of fistfuls of chopped peeled garlic that went into the electric cooker with organic diced tomatoes, water and uncooked rice. Spinach, fish, garlic and avocado oil were from Costco Wholesale.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
Editor


Costco Wholesale's 3-pound bag of peeled Christopher Ranch California Garlic encourages you to use a free hand with the pungent flavoring in home-cooked dishes.

Just don't make the mistake I did of chopping up a handful of raw cloves and mixing them into a salad made from canned tuna, pink salmon and sardines.

Cooking mellows the Monviso heirloom variety of garlic from California, and I've been adding it to sauteed baby spinach, bottled pasta sauce, organic brown rice and the egg mixture that goes into a frittata.

A 3-pound bag of the refrigerated garlic was $5.99 at my Hackensack warehouse store. 

I squeezed lime juice over Icelandic haddock fillets ($8.99 a pound at Costco), breaded them in a Super Spice Mixture I keep in a tub in the refrigerator and baked them at 375 degrees for about 14 minutes.

The baby spinach with garlic re-appeared at breakfast the next day with an organic brown egg, store-bought tofu, a leftover wedge of yam-and-pesto frittata, and brown rice with garlic.

I chopped up a couple of fistfuls of peeled garlic and threw them into bottled pasta sauce with sardines I heated up while 1 pound of Whole Foods Market Organic Whole Wheat Linguine cooked. When making organic whole wheat shells with pesto, I've thrown chopped garlic into the pasta water. Whole Foods Market organic whole wheat pasta from Italy cooks up al dente in less time than listed on the package.

Nothing could be more convenient for garlic lovers than a big bag of peeled California garlic at a reasonable price.