Roasted garlic

 Michael and I love garlic. In fact, if a recipes calls for 2 cloves we put in 4. We could have garlic with almost any savory dish and not be sick of it. This recipe for roasted garlic is from my friend Jessica. I used to shy away from recipes with roasted garlic because it seemed like something so tasty would also be quite complicated to make. Who knew that roasting garlic would be so easy!? It's super easy and delicious and if you buy your garlic in bulk like we do it's a great way to use up some of the garlic as the bag comes to the end. I used it today with a pasta dish but you can use it really however you'd like- the possibilities are endless. If you roast it long enough it will get mushy and this is wonderful smeared on a piece of crusty homemade bread.

Ingredients:

1 bunch of garlic- or however much you'd like to do at once
salt
pepper
olive oil
other spices if you'd like
aluminum foil
oven (I'm really just trying to make this list longer. As you can see, there are very few ingredients and did I mention it is going to be so easy to make!?)

1. Pre-heat the oven to 375ºF or really whatever temperature you need to between 350ºF and 400ºF if you're baking something else along with this. I recommend not turning your oven on just for roasting garlic but in a pinch it can be done!

2. Cut the tips off the garlic with a sharp knife. It should look something like this:

3. Place garlic in some aluminum foil and sprinkle some salt and freshly cracked pepper on top and then drizzle a little olive oil on top of that.

4. Wrap the aluminum foil around the garlic and place on a baking sheet (or a loaf pan, or really just on the oven rack). Cook for about 15 minutes or more- depending on how roasted you'd like it. Trial and error can be your friend!

5. Now you have delicious roasted garlic. The garlic cloves smoosh right out of the skin and are so easy to use from here. You could put it on pizza, sandwiches, salads, pasta, with some steamed broccoli, spinach, etc. Sometimes I like to just eat it by itself. Enjoy!