When my Mom brought over a small bag of early garlic scapes from a nearby farmer’s market, I immediately sent out feelers over FaceBook and Twitter to find the best way to make use of them. My social media hive brain has occasionally been the source of inspired culinary experiments. Most of the recommendations were for a pesto, but I only had about six or seven scapes, hardly enough to even reach the food processor’s blade. Instead, I added them to a sauteed asparagus dish, where their delicate garlic flavor provided a scintillating accompanying flavor, and saved a particularly curvy one for a martini garnish. (A friend said I should stuff an olive with the scape, so I made double use of it as the olive holder.)
It was a stroke of genius. There was just enough flavor in the single cut end of a scape to subtly shade a single martini. The olive, threaded onto the surprisingly firm stem (no flimsy, hollow chive nonsense here) took on just the merest hint of garlic goodness. It was reminiscent of the three tiny drops of garlic olive oil that were once added to a martini I savored in Washington, DC. (At first I balked at the preciousness of the thing, the way the eye-dropper was so carefully placed, dotting the surface of the gin in three distinct spots. But the taste, while questionable at first, made such a difference. When it comes to altering the classic martini, a little goes a long way.) Here, a variation on the traditional olive martini with just a nod to a Gibson (the garlic makes a potent substitution for a cocktail onion) is a refreshing way of employing any extra-curly scapes that find their way into your kitchen.
