High-Allicin Garlic Butter the LastCathar Way

I’ve been all about garlic for some time now. I’ve always heard that garlic has many medicinal characteristics, and I can attest to some. When I get sick, a clove or two eaten raw is usually all it takes to cure me. I grow garlic in my garden and use it in a million recipes. One clove of garlic has four (4) calories. That means that the flavor any recipe gains from this ingredient comes at a very low cost in terms of calories, not to mention that garlic has zero fat and zero cholesterol.

Recently I read a paper on the process that forms allicin in garlic. Allicin is the ingredient that gives garlic its smell, but it is also the ingredient that gives garlic its magical healing and preventive powers. It seems that allicin is only formed when a clove is chewed, cut, or crushed. Various ingredients of the garlic are then released, and they combine to form allicin. This is thought to be garlic's defense mechanism against pests. Allicin is quick to lose its potency and easy to destroy. Microwaving completely negates all of garlic’s health benefits. Cooking in an oven does the same damage, but not nearly as fast: baking for 60 minutes leaves no measurable allicin in the garlic. 

So I have devised a recipe that I believe maximizes the health benefits of garlic. The preparation is fast and easy--if smelly--but it is designed to work with garlic's powers, not against them: it takes into account all the above characteristics of garlic, resulting in a wonderful and versatile spread for toast or vegetables like squash, spinach, kale....

After removing the skins from two heads of garlic, crush the cloves. You should end up with a big pile of very smelly crushed garlic. Cover this pile and let it set for ten minutes. The sources I read suggested ten minutes was enough time for the formation of allicin to be complete. 

While the crushed garlic does its thing, soften one stick of butter, and heat two tablespoons of olive oil in a shallow frying pan.

Fry the garlic in the oil. Garlic burns fast, so keep it moving in the hot oil. The idea is to cook the garlic as rapidly as possible until it is soft, and avoid overcooking, in order to make the garlic palatable while minimizing damage to its allicin content. The crushed garlic is ready when it just begins to brown. Take it off the heat, add the softened stick of butter and mix together using a fork, until the shreds of crushed garlic are evenly distributed in the mashed butter. Cover and store in fridge.

The resulting garlic butter will be both flavorful and healthful, and should remain good for a week. It is wonderful on toast, on corn, on veggies...

This basic way of preparing garlic can work in a number of recipes, with or without the added butter. Just be aware that any additional cooking will tend to reduce the effectiveness of the allicin in the garlic.

For an excellent overview of the current research on garlic’s health benefits (and the occasional unsubstantiated claims of same) visit Oregon State’s website.

 and now that I'm thinking about it, I wonder what would happen if I left out the butter and just used the garlic as a spread all by itself? I'll let you know how it goes...

Last of the Cathars

Once, long ago, I set out to find any remaining adherents of Catharism, the ancient Christian religion that was wiped out by the Catholic church almost a thousand years ago. When I say “wiped out” I mean exactly that. The Catholics spent over one hundred years in crusades against them. Cathars worshipped Jesus but did not do so the Catholic way, with big buildings and fancy outfits. They believed in open-air worship. After eventually defeating the last Cathar stronghold at Montsegur in 1244, the Catholics invented the Inquisition as a way of rooting-out any remaining adherents. 

I figured if anybody was a practicing Cathar now, they would probably have some kind of annual get-together at Montsegur on the day Cathars had celebrated as Christ’s birthday—March 13. So I flew to France, drove to Montsegur, climbed high up in the Pyrenees to the peak of “le pog,” and spent the day freezing my butt off in the ruins of the castle. Nobody showed up. 

Since that day, I have considered myself the Last Cathar.

Some time after the above adventure, I learned that there is in fact a very active Cathar community in France. Just as I expected, every year they gather at Montsegur, but their annual event takes place on March 16, the day Montsegur fell to the Catholics. I had gotten there ahead of them. But I get to keep the title. They’re celebrating the wrong day.

June 6, 2012

Today, diversity is on my mind. God made diversity. People don't seem to be able to afford it. We aim lower. We unify and minimize and standardize and mass-produce. But there I go saying “we.” On my own shores, I don't minimize or standardize much, but I look around and see it happening, and then my shoreline dissolves and I find myself standing in line in some air-conditioned bank lobby, walking on a bleak cement sidewalk, or staring dumbly at the magazines and candy bars in some grocery checkout. All these places have been designed to keep people in order, and I'm people, too, I guess. So I have to say “we” sometimes, but it seems to me that “we” and “me” are two different people, and one of us is out of order.
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One summer while I was in college, I worked as a peach-picker, at an orchard on a hillside overlooking Lake Dardanelle near Russellville, Arkansas. Mornings were spent walking tree-to-tree, picking the peaches that looked ready, filling the owner's ancient Ford flatbed with battered wooden crates of fresh peaches. Afternoons were spent under the rusty tin roof of the sorting shed, where the morning's pick was sorted and packed. Based on size, peaches were rolled down a chute into a nicer, slightly newer crate. There were four chutes: Small, Medium, Large, and Bad. Bad peaches had a gouge or a rotten place or some other unsellable flaw. When these crates filled, they were loaded onto another truck, to be hauled to the train station or a local grocery store. 
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Us workers could have all of the bad peaches we wanted; the rest went to the local churches for distribution to the needy. 
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Now, I mention this because I go through life being sorted pretty much the same way those peaches were. I feel like my value is determined with only a glance, except instead of  physical dimensions, it is economic dimensions that count: do I have a Small, Medium, or Large bank account. But I must be none of the above, because I always seem to end up rolling down that fourth chute. 
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Like I was saying, God made diversity. The grocery stores of Russellville had nice little displays of perfect peaches. But you could step outside and look down the street, where shabby people were milling around at the back of the church. Blessed were the poor, who got the assorted “bad” peaches, the ones that wouldn’t sell. Their lunches (and mine too, that summer) were not so predictable. 
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Let me close with my only other peach story: As I said, the orchard had been located on a hillside above Lake Dardanelle where, as it happened, a nuclear power plant—Arkansas Nuclear One—was under construction. All summer as we walked through the orchard picking peaches, we could look down the slope and watch the bulldozers and the cement trucks below, going to and fro in the earth, pushing dirt up and down in it. Almost twenty years later I was telling my peach-picking story to a friend, and she got all excited. She knew something I didn't. She had been a news reporter at the time, and had interviewed the owner of the orchard. She told me this: shortly after Nuclear One was fired-up, the peach trees started dying. Within months the entire orchard was dead. The owner sued the power company. The lawsuit made headlines (thus the interview) but ultimately he lost the case, since he was unable to prove beyond a shadow of doubt any connection between the nuclear power plant and his dead trees.
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So I guess I have to admit that there are times when “we” can be a very worthwhile point of view to espouse. But the owner of that orchard got stuck with being an “I.” We all did.
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