Story time.

When my wife and I were dating and in high school, she decided to cook a meal for her parents. She found a recipe for some kind of baked penne.

My wife’s family weren’t terribly familiar with making Italian food. They are Pennsylvania Dutch, and her mother wasn’t all that interested in cooking. The only garlic my wife ever saw growing up was garlic powder. This was her first time cooking with real garlic. Her mother never bothered because it was too much work.

My wife (well, girlfriend at the time) called me up to tell me she understood why her mother never used real garlic. She said the recipe called for one clove, and “it took forever to peel all those little things”.

I had to explain to her that each of those little things were the cloves. What she added to the recipe wasn’t one clove of garlic. It was the entire bulb.

There must have been vampires just dropping out of the sky over their house that night.

The smartest thing my dad did in his life was marry my mom. Luckily for me, my wife found inspiration in my mother’s cooking. The whole reason she wanted to make the recipe she made was because she wanted to learn to cook like my mom. Over the years she learned my mom’s recipes (lots of ethnic food: Italian, Slavic, Greek, Jewish, etc.).

She is still a big fan of garlic, although she doesn’t typically include an entire bulb in the recipe.