Last year I went to the Arizona Renaissance Festival with my husband and some friends. We walked around all the shops, caught the Ded Bob Show, had a turkey leg, watched a joust, laughed through the Tortuga Twins, saw all the wonderful crafts, enjoyed the glass-blowing demonstration.. and generally had a great time. But the best part? On the way out, my husband and I spied a huge sign that touted GARLIC- which of course was a sign that neither he nor I could walk past. They had several types of pickled garlic for sale and, after sampling every one of them, we came home with a bottle of pickled garlic with jalapeños. They are so good on sandwiches, salads, mixed into salsa... eaten whole by themselves... yum..

I had plans to go to the Festival today with some friends and I knew the one thing I was definitely going to buy were a few bottles of the pickled garlic. I ran out pretty quickly last year and I wanted to have a good stock to last me longer this year. Unfortunately my friends wound up not being able to go to the festival, and I didn't want to drive for over an hour to get there only to pay the entrance fee and hang out by myself, even if it did mean I'd come away with these pickled gems.

So what is a girl to do? Make her own!

I found this recipe for Pickled Garlic with Hot Pepper on Recipezaar (a great recipe resource, by the way!)

It's pretty easy to shop for the supplies for this recipe. I had everything but the habaneros I had decided to use instead of jalapeños (I like it hot!) I left out the red peppers and used apple cider vinegar instead of white vinegar for more flavor. I halved the recipe except for the peppers- I was making two small bottles, and I put 3 peppers in each bottle (did I mention I like it HOT?) Here are my lovely bottles of Pickled Garlic & Habanero Peppers:

They have to rest for 2 weeks before I can eat them to allow the garlic and peppers to pickle and the flavors to blend... oh, the torture! I'll report back then to let you know how they turned out.

By the way, just in case no one caught the reference in my title (which wouldn't surprise me, I'm just weird that way): That was part of the first song in the ending credits to Care Bears in Wonderland, sung by Grumpy himself. Here is a clip from Youtube (the song starts at 2:50):



This movie was a favorite of my brother and I when we were kids. We used to pick a character each and say all the lines of that character throughout the whole movie. Grumpy was our favorite and we would fight over who would "be" him each time! This song was going through my head while I made the pickled garlic- there is a line (starting at 3:10) where Grumpy sings "I'm filling up my belly with ice cream and jelly and topping it with pickled beets." Ah, good times.