My Grandpa's Garlic

Saturday January 9, 2010

This is a story about garlic. But not just any garlic. This garlic, like many of my friends, has been cultivated into something exceptional, though it is of humble origin. This garlic, also like many of my friends, is first generation Chinese-Canadian. His father, and his father before him, grew up in the sun-baked fields of southern China, just another bulb buried under the strain of years of agro-industrial colonialism. Then, when he was one day finally ready to leave the fields in search of a better life, he was crammed into a shipping container and spent weeks suffocating with his myriad countrymen, praying that he would make the arduous journey to Canada alive. Finally having arrived, all heads were counted, the dead ones discarded and written off, and our indentured traveler found not the freedom he was promised. Rather, doomed to spend the rest of his shelf-life imprisoned in a mesh bag, he finds only the tyrannical oversight of the supermarket. If he were any other Joe Clove, he would have grown too old to be deemed useful and sentenced to compost, or been garishly minced and likely burnt in some yuppie housewife's miserable recreation of an Emeril Lagasse recipe.

Enter: Robert Lacasse, Sr. This man is my grandfather. Retired rural logger turned worldwide web blogger, it has somehow become this man's impassioned mission to research and develop the most efficient and productive methods of boutique garlic cultivation. This is no garden-variety green thumb; I will tell you with familial certainty that this man produces the most perfect purple garlic north of Nanaimo. And our aforementioned protagonist has the great fortune to find himself at the bottom of my grandpa's shopping bag. If garlic could smile, this bulb's beam would clear the clouds from all the coast. To his great surprise, he was not cruelly hacked apart by a dull ten dollar kitchen knife, or crushed by the most unforgiving of unnecessary kitchen contraptions, the garlic press. He was instead lovingly laid to rest beneath the moist, loamy topsoil of suburban Campbell River. Peacefully, and with the loving care that only such a salt-of-the-earth old man can provide, he blossomed forth with a new progeny... a small field of plump cloves in the backyard of my grandparents' mobile home.

And so it came to be that, as the most effortless but most bountiful gift from an effortlessly bountiful man (who raised a brood of 7 young'uns), I received a 5lb mandarin orange box stuffed with clumps of dirt hiding the sweet, white jewels of the earth. I knew immediately that I would be roasting a lot of this garlic, with it's ridiculous sugar content and smooth, robust aroma. And so it came to be that I acquired 3L of nectar from the most valiant of olives, those chosen to be pressed for their essence and sent across the world to us not fortunate enough to dwell in the shadows of their branches. These likely bedfellows are now under my care... and I will ensure their union. After a generation of struggle, these all-too-different personalities from either end of my earth will discover for the first time how famously they get on. I am playing matchmaker with two souls I know so very well.