"Doctors urge women to stop putting garlic in vaginas..."

A teaser at Drudge goes to "No, Putting Garlic in Your Vagina Will Not Cure a Yeast Infection" (at Oprah Magazine). The best part of that is the comments, which generally proceed on 2 themes, exemplified by: 1. "But garlic pairs well with fish" and 2. "Keeps away vampires!"

At the Garlic Harvest Café...

... get to the root.

Purchase of the day.

From the February 23, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

OXO SteeL Garlic Press, Stainless (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $1.60)

... and 50 other items purchased through the Althouse Amazon portal.

Thanks to all you stinkers who read this blog.

Mid-November... and the first shoots of the garlic crop appear...

... on the Meadhouse farmland...

At the Garlic Harvest Café...

... let's be methodical about the differences.

(Enlarge photo.)

ADDED: This was a taste test with 12 varieties of allium ophioscorodon — hardneck garlic — all grown this year by Meade, from Wisconsin stock, planted last October.

At the Garlic Harvest Café...

... everything is named and labeled.

At the Garlic Café...

... go ahead and stink up the joint.

Meade shows you how to harvest garlic...

... and talks Meadhouse philosophy with me:



This video goes to the max of what YouTube lets you upload: 15 minutes. Why is it so long? To indulge anyone out there who would like to luxuriate in the ambiance of the Meadhouse garden. There's some advice about garlic, dieting, politics, pancakes, etc.

"First garlic harvest!"

Says Meade, plunking these down on the counter:



(That's not the counter. I took them outside for good natural light.)

Here's some of the as-yet-unharvested garlic:



Although Meade has grown garlic commercially at other times, in other places, this garlic was planted only because Meade bought a whole lot of harvested garlic from some vendor at the Dane County Farmers' Market, and when he got it home, he discovered it hadn't been properly dried and considered it unfit for eating. So he planted the garlic bulbs, which are in the genus Allium, in a row behind the flowering alliums.

You saw Meade planting the smallest of the flowering alliums in this video last fall. (The day after Election Day. Included in the video is a shot of a political sign in the neighbors' yard for the lefty candidate who was more left than the lefty candidate who won.*) And here's a picture of what the 2 taller types of allium looked like flowering in May.

__________

*Brett Hulsey.

"First, Mr. Foer was to visualize a large bottle of pickled garlic (whatever that is) standing in his family driveway in place of a car."

"Next, he was to picture 'an enormous wading-pool-size tub of cottage cheese' at the front door and to imagine the model Claudia Schiffer swimming in that tub of curds; and so on down the list, in each case finding as creative and, well, as memorable an image as possible."

At the Chili Café...

... don't overcook the garlic!

"I don’t want to be thinking... about how many calories are in this slice of (delicious!) olive bread..."

"...or in that crème brulee or pile of pea shoots sauteed in sesame oil with garlic. And I certainly don’t want to see that information on a menu. Two words that have no place on a good restaurant’s menu: 'Nutrition information.'"

ADDED: I note the phrase "a good restaurant." So is it fine as far as Sifton is concerned to require fast food joints to display the calorie counts? Exactly why?

News story that reads like a bad law school exam.

From UPI:

A Massachusetts man has been charged with catching and killing a squirrel and then roasting it with a blowtorch in his backyard.

Odum Chaloeurn's neighbors in Lowell reported him to the police, the Boston Herald said. He was charged with animal cruelty Wednesday.

Chaloeurn reportedly argued to police that he was not cruel to the squirrel since it was dead before he began cooking it. He allegedly pursued the squirrel on foot, grabbed it by its tail and then knocked it against a tree to kill it.

Squirrels are actually legal game in Massachusetts to licensed hunters. But Lowell is in a district where the squirrel season opens Saturday.

Discuss!

IN THE COMMENTS: Duscany said:

I wonder what the charge would be if he had sauteed the squirrel in butter and garlic, then slowly simmered it the rest of the afternoon in mushrooms and Chianti and served it at dusk with polenta while Vivaldi played on the digital radio and his girlfriend slipped into something comfortable?

Duscany's fine understanding of Critical Legal Studies earns him an A.

"I ate orange slices topped with crushed olives, oil, and fennel seeds... I ate cabbage and beans with garlic and oil, and even that was mesmerizing."

Posh vegetarian cookery.

[Marco] Folicaldi believes in using “too much” garlic, and he’s not shy about large quantities of olive oil or cheese either, so the food is consistently strong-flavored and rich.

Vegetarianism is no more a weight-loss strategy than meat-eating.

The 100 greatest moments in the history of food.

Assembled here.

Of course, you know what #1 is. #2 is harder to guess, and it's a matter of opinion, but I approve:

1762 The sandwich is created as gambler John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, calls for his dinner to be put between two slices of bread so he can continue his card game with one hand and eat with the other. Lunchtimes would never be the same again.

The discovery of egg salad must necessarily rank far lower. But in the egg category, I think the greatest moment is the separation of yolk and white. Think of all that follows from that!

But actually, the egg hardly figures in the top 100. Its first appearance is at #21 as a mere ingredient in the Caesar salad:

1924 In Tijuana, Mexico, restaurateur Caesar Cardini is short of food after a big party. Scouring the kitchen, he digs out lettuce, bread, garlic, Worcestershire sauce, Parmesan, eggs and lemon, and knocks up the first Caesar salad, a dish that does at least look healthy despite being full of fat. It is, needless to say, hugely popular.

Ha ha. I love the idea that one of the all-time great recipes is a quirk of what one guy, one day, happened to have in the kitchen. But I'm sure this is the source of many recipes, including the most horrendous ones.

What's the best/worst/weirdest concoction you ever made from what you happened to have on hand? Tell the story. I remember once being treated — along with a large group of partyers who'd stayed overnight somewhere on Long Island — to a breakfast of eggs with sliced hot dogs scrambled into them. Since we were very hungry, it tasted delicious. That was decades ago, and I've never felt the urge to make scrambled eggs and hot dogs.

I do remember once making creamed tuna on mashed potatoes — in a situation where soft food was a medical requirement. It seemed really good at the time, but I never made it again... needless to say.

The new National Film Registry films, including "Duck and Cover."

The new 25 films for Congress's National Film Registry have been announced. These are films chosen for their "cultural, historical or aesthetic significance." The only ones I've seen are "Eraserhead" (1978), "The Nutty Professor" (1963), "Schindler's List" (1993), "Unforgiven" (1992), and -- I'm guessing now -- "Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor" (1936) and "Pups is Pups (Our Gang)" (1930). And, like most people, I've seen part of "Jailhouse Rock" (1957). One I haven't seen but was curious enough to look up is "Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers" (1980). It really is a documentary about garlic.

Also on the list, and clearly a part of the American cultural heritage, is the 1951 civil defense film "Duck and Cover." I don't remember ever being shown this, maybe because I didn't reach elementary school age until the late 1950s. I do, however, remember air raid drills. These did not involve getting under the desks, as famously depicted in "Duck and Cover." We went out in the hall and curled up on our knees, with our heads against the wall and our hands clasped behind our necks. I can certainly remember having no idea what we were preparing for. I knew what "air" meant, and I knew what a "fire drill" referred to, even though the word "drill" didn't mean anything. "Raid" didn't mean anything either. So "air raid drill" was just one of those things we did, like "pledge allegiance." They told us to do it, and we did.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, when I was 11 and had some vague idea of what was happening, the school sent us home with a memo to give to our parents. The memo informed the parents that they needed to teach those of us who rode the bus how to make our way home on foot. Presumably, the school envisioned a nuclear war in which the children would be wandering about and ought to at least attempt to walk home. My parents did nothing in response to this memo, which puzzled me back then (when I also fretted about their failure to build a bomb shelter). I'm sure they wouldn't have thought much of our air raid drills either.

UPDATE: "Duck and Cover" is in the public domain. You can download or stream it here. Okay, I've watched it now. That's really quite disturbing. You begin with an animated turtle ("dum dum deedle dum dum") and before long you're being told over and over again that 'the flash may come at any time," so you must be instantly ready to jump onto the ground and cover yourself up, like these people on a picnic who go under the picnic cloth ("They know that even a thin cloth helps protect them"). Just before the peppy music ends the film, the kids are told: "Older people will help us, as they always do. But there might not be any grownups around when the bomb explodes. Then, you're on your own!"