June Scapes

Every vegetarian should have neighbors like Jane and George, whose meticulously tended garden has yielded our most exciting culinary finds this year. Tonight, George introduced us to the wonders of garlic scapes, those elegant swirls and seedpods that develop atop hard-neck garlic stalks in June.

Thanks to those scapes, we dined tonight on one of the best pestos we've had in months. (And that's saying a lot, since we regularly make fresh pesto from our basil plants.) Scape pesto is smooth and flavorful, but in a subtle, garlicky-lemony way.

The recipe is trés simple:
• 6-7 garlic scapes, chopped
• approx. 1 c. olive oil
• 1 c. grated parmesan or asiago cheese* (The latter tastes best.)

We used a mini-chopper to combine the scapes and olive oil, which turned a brilliant, if watery-looking, green. We blended this by hand with the fresh-grated (hard) mozzarella and poured it over angel-hair pasta, which we then garnished with toasted pine nuts, olives, and fresh tomatoes.

Garlic scape pesto apparently freezes well. Not that we'd know, since we reluctantly turned over the remaining portion to Jane and George. Sigh. It was the right thing to do. But, as God is my witness, my June diet henceforth will be heavy on the scapes.

P.S. If you don't have generous, gardening neighbors, you can still get garlic scapes at the farmer's market or food co-op. (And probably some grocery stores, too.) For more neat garlic scape recipes, visit this site.