We grow garlic for the garlic bulbs but those scapes are the icing on the cake. Yuk . . garlic icing doesn’t even sound good but the scapes are so good.
This time of year, they go into everything – gravy, sauce, even into our omelettes but especially sauteed or grilled and served as a side. But there were more scapes than I could use. When the garlic first started producing scapes, I could incorporate them all in our meals easily and I would cut them as needed but we were having too many scapes and they needed to all be cut so I curled up the ones (they want to curl up anyway) that were very tender and poked them down into jars. The ends that were a bit tougher got chopped and went into a jar and pickling liquid/spices were poured over them. I’ll leave them in the fridge for at least a month before we start eating them as we would pickles.
There was leftover pickling liquid so I did the same with the asparagus I had picked that day.
I cut the spears down so they would stand up in a quart jar, then cut the excess length into pieces and put them in a pint jar, poured the pickling spice over them and now we have a bit of pickled asparagus. I always hope to end up with at least 12 or 15 jars of pickled asparagus. Our patch is small and young so I will get two jars here and two jars there but by the time we stop cutting the asparagus, hopefully we will have enough to at least enjoy a bit of asparagus through the year.