I didn't try Garlic until I was away at University. Both of my parents hate the taste and the smell so therefore I had never really eaten it living at home. Obviously I had garlic bread but thats not real garlic is it? I remember my flatmate at university cooking us a spaghetti bolognese and getting this funny looking white onion thing out of her cupboard and me looking in amazement at it. This sounds stupid now but I really didn't know what it was.

Garlic is a bulb that is almost like an orange inside in that it is made up of segments. These segments are encased in a pink waxy easy to peel covering and all the segments are covered in a white almost thin tissue paper material. There is a stalk in the middle (which obviously you don't eat.) To release a segment you simply break some of the white covering and almost snap one (or 4 in my case) of the segments out. Now you need to peel the pink covering off and this is easiest to do if you chop both of the ends of (one end is flat the other is pointed.) Garlic belongs to a group that also includes onions, shallots and lekks (all pretty potent smelling ones then)

Now I always used to crush my garlic in a garlic press (about £2.00 in supermarkets) but have recently stopped. Firstly Jamie Oliver reckons that you should always chop garlic with a knife or put it under the flat blade of the knife and slam your hand onto it to crush it - but he says you should never use a garlic press. Well if this is good enough for Jamie then its good enough for me. Also garlic presses are incredibly difficult to clean and you never quite get all of the garlic out of it - so very unhygenic then. Basically I chop it up small or big depends on what I am using it in and use it this way (does anyone know how to get rid of the smell from your fingers after doing this?)

Garlic can be bought as a bulb in the supermarket (its normally located by the potato's and chilli's) and costs literally 40p a bulb. Not bad value considering that a bulb holds anything between 15 and 20 segments. You can also buy 'lazy garlic' - the manufactures name not mine. That is literally crushed garlic in a jar with olive oil. Its a bit more expensive at £1.49 and I've never tried it but might be good as a store cupboard ingredient. You can buy garlic granules to sprinkle on steaks and salads and some supermarkets even do it frozen. You can also buy garlic capsules from health food shops to get the benefits but without the smell or the taste. All this is well and good but you really can't beat the garlic bulb for taste, cheapness and easy of use.

Garlic is a herb/bulb that can be used in almost any savoury dish. Its lovely in spaghetti bolognese, spices up a roast chicken nicely, is amazing stuffed into roast lamb, can be used on toasted bread for 'proper' garlic bread, is lovely with roasted vegetables. The list really is endless.

Garlic have long been proven to have health benefits as both a food to digest and with topical use. If you have a cold sore appearing they say that rubbing a garlic clove over the tingle will sort out the cold sore (not about this one to be honest.) Garlic has been proven in many medical studies to help lower cholestorel and can literally be a life saver in heart disease when lowering cholestorel and therefore can reduce the risks of strokes. Garlic has been proven as well to have anti-biotic properties and when taken can help to ward off colds or even get you better faster if you have one.

A quick scout on google and this brings up hundreds of web sites devoted totally to garlic. Apparently the link between vampires (like they exist anyway) and garlic is non-existant but has been made up by the movies. More garlic info is that apparently garlic is called the stinking rose but is nearer to the lily family than the rose family - however its called the stinking rose because it stinks and resembles a white rose when looked at from under neath. See you've learnt a new fact about fact about garlic today.