Roasted Garlic Puree

I really highly recommend roasting your own garlic for several reasons:

--it gives you a really mellow garlic flavour without the sharp taste of raw garlic

--you won't have to peel and chop garlic every time you want it

--it's smooth and melts into whatever you're cooking so you don't end up with bits of garlic

--it's delish

Start with 10-12 whole heads of garlic. Chop the tops off the garlic bulbs and arrange in a dish.
Place them cut side up in a lightly greased oven tin.
You will have a bit of wastage. Don't worry about it.
Now take some olive oil and spread it over the cut tops of the garlic. You can either brush it on with a pastry brush, or throw all the heads into a plastic bag, add a few spoonfulls of oil and shake to coat.
Arrange the oiled garlic heads in your tin.
Salt and pepper the cloves.
Cover the tin with aluminum foil. Here is an artsy picture of tin foil! Roast the garlic in the oven at 350F for about 45 minutes. While that happens your house will fill up with the scent of nice garlic.
When it's done the cloves will be slightly shrunk and very very soft. Let the garlic cool a bit so you can handled them.
Get the garlic out of the paper skin by either scooping each clove out with a knife, or squeezing the whole head of garlic and letting the cloves pop or squeeze out.

At this point, you can just scrape this stuff on some bread or crackers and it will be delicious. I like to put it in a food processor and blitz to make a smooth paste. You can store this paste in an empty jam jar and spoon it into anything you're cooking, mix it with butter and spread it onto bread to make garlic bread, whatever you like.
Yum! This should last about a month or so. Pretty good results for 15 minutes of work!

Priya Mango Pickle

I was visiting my mom over Christmas and she gave me her last bottle of this Indian condiment, a mixture of grated green mangos, oil and tons of hot spices. Apparently it is only made in this one factory in this one state of India (so I was told, I might have been lied to).

I positively grew up on this stuff and have elevated many dishes from good to great with it. I can't imagine eating some dishes without it. I used to spread it on buttered bread before I accepted that this was actually kind of gross. It was the last bottle because apparently it can no longer be sold in the United States due to failing FDA requirements!

I don't know what exactly this means. It could be anything from... they put sewage directly into the bottle to... they don't list nutritional content according to legal requirements. I'm hoping the problem is on this end of the spectrum. Beyond that, I don't want to know what the problem is. For all intents and purposes, this is the last bottle of this stuff in my world. I'm going to enjoy it in blissful ignorance.

And, boy, am I enjoying it. In everything.