How to use up 50 heads of garlic in 3 months

To those of you who have complained that there's a dearth of garlic on this blog (which being named "Garlic is Love," should really have more garlic), I offer this post:

We had an Iron Chef party in June for my friend's birthday. We were given three options on what the secret ingredient might be, and it turned out to be "Battle Garlic." (Woo-hoo!) I won, but only by one point (a very close battle indeed).

The Chairman, the birthday girl's husband, wanted to dramatically rip the cover off the theme ingredients to reveal them, just like they do on the show. Which he did, by buying about 50 heads of garlic.

As the two chefs cooked, it slowly dawned on the "Chairman" that he had bought way too much garlic (The boy doesn't cook much). Even with my dishes of individual roasted garlic, we went through fewer than a half a dozen of the heads.

Oops.

We wound up splitting the difference, and I went home with about 25 heads of baby garlic, mexican garlic, and elephant garlic (which is actually a leek).

Thus, why I scrambled to find new ways to use up the leftover garlic this past summer.

Here's what I came up with:

* Anytime I was sauteeing anything, I added one clove of minced garlic. (1 clove per recipe)
* I made lots of dips that use a lot of garlic, like tsati..tzaz...cucumber garlic dip...onion dip with garlic, herb dip with garlic, hummus, and so on. (1-2 cloves per recipe)
* Garlic bread (1-2 cloves per recipe)
* Garlic dill pickles. (4-5 cloves per jar)
* Garlic soup. (1 HEAD per recipe)
* Chocolate covered garlic--no, wait, no one lets me cook that anymore... (1-2 HEADS of garlic per recipe, theoretically)
And, the mother of all garlic dishes when you have a ton of garlic...
* Chicken and 40 cloves of garlic (4-5 HEADS per recipe!!)

Armed with this phalanx of garlic recipes, I got through 25 heads before Labor Day, and even found myself using so much garlic that I had to go out and get a bunch of fresh stuff in bulk at the farmer's market.

I'll post the recipes separately.