Garlic scape season is here! The season is short, but brings a welcomed mild garlic flavor.
Garlic scapes are the curly shoots of the garlic plant, picked before it blooms. Harvested in full curl, they are ‘tender and delicious.’
Last year my experimenting with scapes had me tossing them in the blender raw for hummus, roasting them with potatoes, sautéing them as a base for pasta sauce and really enjoying them minced in a garlic potato salad (see eating tab for recipe).
I found I just use the tender part of the scape – from the base up until it gets a little bulbus where the flower would start.
*Another use for scapes I tried this year includes just steaming them and eating as a side dish. Fresh lemon juice, butter, salt and pepper made a great topping. They aren’t as strong as the garlic bulb, so it wasn’t a problem to have a nice healthy helping of them:)
*I chopped them fine and added them to baking powder biscuits. Very nice.
*A great article about scapes can be found here. At the end of the article is a terrific recipe for pesto that I tried.
More reading here and I found more pesto recipes, suggestions for use in stir-fry and as a fresh bracelet (at the market perhaps?).
abundantacre.wordpress.com 
We purchased a small jar of pickled scapes on Pender Island one time. They were fantastic and I have been pleading with my mom to get her to harvest them at just the right time so I can make some myself.
Pickled scapes sound great! I can taste them right now.