Garlic Gluttony

A little while ago, I had a bit of a garlic glut.
Not a real glut, I guess - it's not as though my personal garlic farm had been ridiculously productive or anything - more just a spate of overenthusiastic buying - gluttony as opposed to gluttery, if you will.

Now, I'm a pretty keen eater of garlic, but even I would find it difficult to work more than a couple of heads a day into our dinner, so I needed a solution.

I racked my brains and managed to dredge up from some of the darker recesses that garlic is both nice and also pretty when one confits it, so that's what I did.

I peeled about a million cloves and poached them really gently in olive oil (with a bit of basil, salt and peppercorns) and then stuck them in a sterilised jar.

Et voila - confit garlic.

It obviously lasted about three and a half minutes before I ate it all.

Just One Cornetto...

Or maybe a few, actually, now that I think about it...

I made some ice cream cones - I used the recipe here, which I believe originated with David Lebovitz (hardly surprising really!).

And once I had the hang of it, they weren't even too hard to "cone up", though it's lucky I have asbestos-like fingers.

They were nice - we ate some of the ones that didn't make it - very very sweet - like a cornetto, so we did a bit of research.

I made a vanilla condensed milk ice cream - I used a bit more cream than condensed milk this time (probably 60:40 instead of the usual 50:50) so as to minimise the sweetness and work better with the sugary sugar cones.

For added cornettoness, I froze some of the ice cream inside the cones and added some dark chocolate and chopped toasted hazelnuts.

We also made a few different cone ideas - some with chocolate and nut rims and some with chocolate coating inside, mainly just as a bit of practice for next time (I'm definitely planning a next time - I have a few 'soirees' coming up - these would be a perfect pudding).

These are in honour of this month's BSFIC challenge.

Familiar Scenes

It's been a while since I forced upon shared with you anything that I've been eating, so here's a very small update.

An unnamed evening last week I got home late to find that husband had already eaten a frozen pizza, so I cunningly grabbed the opportunity to make something he would turn his nose up at (as well as something that could be ready in super-quick time by a very hungry person) and made this vaguely Sichuan style tofu with green beans, which I, slightly randomly, ate with avocado.

Which, as an added bonus, provided leftovers for lunch the next day.

I have also eaten an amazing giant sirloin (I reluctantly shared with husband, but it was still Very Large).

And made (and piggily ate) some awesome fish fragrant aubergine a la Fuschia Dunlop.

Today, I celebrated the bank holiday by going to my very favourite shop in the World to forage for asparagus (mmmmm - asparagus...), where I bought more things than I could carry, including not only the asparagus, but two amazing goose eggs, one of which I boiled and ate for my lunch.

Looks good, no?

Looks like you're in for another month or so of pictures of me eating asparagus.
Sorry*.


*Not really.