Nothing in my youth prepared me for how much time I’d have to spend peeling and chopping and grating and crushing garlic. Maybe I should go for the tube version or even one of those huge jars. I don’t have any reason to suspect that I have a particularly refined palate and would be able to tell the difference. But I don’t want to let down the team.
And cloves! So many recipes call for a certain number of cloves, as if cloves are stamped out of the clove factory at exactly the same size — or even vaguely similar sizes. I often buy the cheaper made-in-China garlic that comes as three bulbs in a pack and the cloves are easily half the size of a the grown-in-Australia version. When a recipe calls for five garlic cloves, like the green soup I made yesterday, I wish they’d put the weight instead. Much easier to work out if you’ve hit the target.
Stopping to get a loaf of the best bread from the best baker in Perth yesterday, I pulled off a perfect bit of parallel parking. I usually avoid this because I’m worried about holding up traffic and under-confident in my spatial judgement. I was so close to driving by that parking spot and finding a park far away or, equally likely, just giving up and going home breadless. But the road behind me was clear so I gave it a go and jagged all the timing and spacing on the turns. Good start to the day. And the soup was much better having the bread to sop it up with.