Oven Roasted Garlic

There is a large amount of garlic in my house. Very large. Easily 30 heads. I love garlic and use it in a lot of my cooking, and Garlic is SO good for you. But at a certain point, if you don’t use it, it dehydrates and shrivels and gets pretty gross. You can only use so much of it. I haven’t been in much of a make-a-big-meal kind of mood, so roasted garlic on veggie crackers made a great meal. I can’t lie, I ate 4 heads. My breath is fabulous.

Ingredients:

• 12 heads of Garlic
• 2 tablespoons of Olive Oil
• Salt and Pepper to taste
• 1/2 teaspoon of dehydrated minced Basil

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
2. Peel all the outside layers off the garlic except the layer that self contains the cloves.
3. Slice off the top sixth of the clove. Depending on how it grows you may be able to cut directly across the head. If not, cutting at an angle will minimize the amount wasted.
4. Mix together the Oil, Salt, Pepper, and Basil in a small bowl and brush generoutly across the tops of the exposed cloves.
5. Wrap each head in tinfoil so it looks like a Hersheys Kiss, and place it in a muffin tin. I find that the tin keeps helps to keep them upright.
6. Bake for 30-35 minutes.

Notes:

• When you’re cutting the tops off you’ll be left with nearly perfect tips of garlic cloves. A lot of them. It’s always nice to save them for later for cooking instead of wasting them.
• I like putting the leftover into the fridge in a container and saving it for use later.
• The garlic is great on Breads, Crackers, or Canapes, and the flavour is much less strong.
• The olive oil helps to caramelize the onions. A big mistake that many people make is not to put any on and they burn and dry out very easily.
• Getting the garlic out of the cloves is super simple. Just slip a knife down the side of the casing and it should slide out smooth as butter.