Ask Mr. Smarty Plants

"If it looks like garlic, tastes like garlic, and smells like garlic, it may well be garlic". Mr. Smarty Plants

Generally in botanical circles garlic is known as  Allium sativum, and is in the same plant family as the onion, the botanical of which is Allium cepa. Garlic is not native to the US, but is widely grown across the country. It is popularly used as a culinary herb, a medicinal plant, and a vampire repellent, so there is a lot of information on the web about garlic.

There are two differences between the garlic plant and the onion plant that are fairly obvious. The first is the the structure of the leaves. Onions have leaves that are hollow cylinders, and this gives rise to ring-like structure you see when you cut an onion bulb in two. The bulb is made of fleshy leaves that surround a very short stem. The leaf of the garlic is a flat blade that resembles grass as you observed. That makes the internal structure of the bulb entirely different, and is why you can have onion rings, but not garlic rings.

The other difference is that the garlic bulb divides into cloves (the number can vary among the different kinds of garlic). Each of the cloves is a branch of the garlic shoot, and has the form of a bulb with a short compact stem that bears a cluster of fleshy leaves. This link has pictures that help with the explanation.

So what are you eating?  In the reading that I have done, I found there is Green Garlic. This is a garlic plant that is picked and used before it has matured enough to produce cloves, so you have only the bulb.