If your Gabriola garden is full of garlic, you might be wondering what to do with your garlic scapes — the loopy stem parts. Mike Hess has the answer at Hard Boiled: When Life Gives You Garlic Scapes, Make Pesto.

See? It’s like a garlicky, delicious snake. Essentially, a garlic scape is the stem of a seed head that the garlic bulb grows from. The reason it’s only around for a few weeks annually is because after a certain point, it begins straightening out, which makes it incredibly tough and much less flavorful. In its young form, however, scapes are garlicky enough to be delicious but certainly not as pungent as straight-up garlic bulbs. They also have a bit of grassy greenness to them, which adds a bit of So, when I saw these babies at the Greenmarket, whether to buy them or not wasn’t the question … it was what to do with them?

If you’re more of the preserving type, these would make a marvelous pickle, and can also be diced fine and used to make compound butter. Since I’m more of the impulsive, want-to-eat-this-now type, I opted to turn the scapes into a pesto. If you’ve got a food processor, it couldn’t be simpler: A bunch of garlic scapes, a lemon, some toasted pine nuts, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and olive oil: [continue, see photos]

Update: if you want a recipe that specifies how much of each ingredient to add, see garlic scape pesto recipe post at umamigirl.com.) Or, hmm, how about garlic scape and almond pesto at doriegreenspan.com? Those sound like good starting places.

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