Recipes from professional Chef Tallyrand:

GARLIC AND CHEESE PIZZA BREAD, BAKED GARLIC PATE, BAKED GARLIC BANANAS

When the moon hits the sky, like a big pizza pie . . .

While the Chinese New Year may start with the emergence of the new moon, we are already well into ours in the Western World. The start of the new year normally sees many of us making promises we can’t or wont keep; the good old New Year’s resolutions. I thought this year I would make culinary one’s; ones that I do fully intend to keep; along with losing a wee bit of the ‘over indulgent Christmas’ weight also! These are:

• Purchase at least one new or one ‘instant’ food product when I go shopping to try. This may seem like a little strange resolution for a chef that loves fresh foods, but I do like to keep up with what I am ‘not’ missing!

• Hunt out new suppliers that can supply me with something a little different so I can try new culinary delights: I already have some kangaroo and crocodile meat in my freezer to experiment with!

• Try to finally talk a friend into giving up buying those pre-made salads and make his own; how long can it take to shred a cabbage, grate a carrot and mix it with mayonnaise?

• Teach everyone in the world how to make fresh fish and chips; home and professional cooks. It is truly a great dish when well prepared and its just so easy to make a batter that is light and crisp . . . don’t you just hate those heavy, soggy batters that are just full of grease? < click here >

• Encourage my trainee chefs to watch all these celebrity chef TV programmes so they may get some ideas for dishes and hopefully see some of the correct techniques and methods of cookery in use that I have taught them

• Stop watching all these celebrity chef programmes myself, ‘cos they frustrate the hell out me, when they crush garlic with a rolling pin, etc

• Convince one and all not to believe every single ‘new fad’ idea that comes out. Because for every newly discovered ‘fact’ there will be another, a week later to counteract it; one week they tell us coffee is bad for the blood pressure, then the next week its coffee will prevent us from getting Parkinson disease or was it Alzeimers? There was even one last year that ‘conclusively’ proved that being vegetarian was the un-healthiest diet for a human. Who or what to believe!?

• Try to get one of those multi-million dollar grants so I can ‘prove’ that chocolate is in fact slimming. Okay I might fail on this one, but oh what fun I will have for the next five years! Well I might not achieve this one . . . but it’s a nice dream!

Well that’s my lot for 2002, I would love to hear any culinary New Year’s Resolutions you have made, either for this year or previously. I will publish the best of and maybe even send a gift for the best of the best!

Last week I promised an update on my Christmas Cake recipe I gave you in December <click here>. You may remember that I trialed a new, easy recipe this year, well okay, last year as it is now. I made my cakes on December 03 and after giving some to the Salvation Army, to friends and family, I still had one left. I have just had this one sitting in my cupboard, wrapped in cling film since then . . . I took it with me this weekend when a group of us went picnicking to a New Zealand equivalent of Ascot or the Kentucky Derby. After six weeks it was still really, really moist and had matured wonderfully. My column last week on the shelf life of foods <click here> got me thinking yesterday . . . I still have half of it remaining, so I am going to leave it and try every couple of weeks to see what it is like, investigate just how long it takes to go stale in texture or flavour . . . so stay tuned!

But on to this week’s recipe(s), lets explore garlic. What an amazing, funky, medicinal plant it is and as can be seen here this week it can be used in a variety of ways. Each with their own merits and each of these three recipes produces and brings out a different nuance of the garlic.

But is it a herb? Is it a spice? Is it a vegetable? I am often asked “What is garlic?”. Technically is it a spice:

• herbs are defined as ‘the leaf of a plant used for seasoning / flavouring of foods’

• spices are defined as ‘parts of a plant other than the leaves that are used for seasoning / flavouring of foods’

• But there again if you use it as a food in its own right (see my recipe below for Baked Garlic Paté) it is also classed as a vegetable.

Other interesting tidbits about garlic include:

• It is supposedly great for the blood and the heart

• It apparently wards off colds and flu

• The French will tell you it is also a great aphrodisiac!

• Parsley has a chemical in it that neutralises the garlic odour; maybe that’s why the great French cooks always put plenty of chopped parsley in garlic butter?

• Try to hunt out ‘elephant’ garlic bulbs, they are huge and make for easy peeling and no more fiddling with those minute cloves! They have a milder, sweeter flavour too.

As Dean Martin crooned: “When the moon hits the sky, like a big pizza pie, that’s amore” . . . well a special lady in my life is called Amo (Te Amohia to be exact) and she just loves this first recipe and lets face it, garlic really is a food for lovers as long as both of you love this wonderful plant. It makes such a wonderful change to normal garlic bread and cooked on a barbeque, it gives your outdoor cooking skills a little boost. As you will see there are endless options for variations on the same theme also.

For this first recipe fresh garlic is a must, please do not try with those pre-crushed garlic pastes . . . in fact why not make that a New Year’s culinary resolution of your own - never to use that convenience crushed garlic again! Trust me, the flavour of fresh garlic is best and you will not regret the extra two minutes it takes to slice or crush your own . . .

“Never treat cooking as a chore, enjoy the time, savour it as you would the food as it sits on the tongue” ~ Chef Tallyrand

Garlic and cheese pizza bread

1.	Make a batch of my pizza dough <click here>
2.	Pre- heat your oven and a baking tray as hot as they will go
3.	Break it up into small ‘buns’
4.	Roll each out into very thin rounds (approx. 1cm thick), do not worry if they are only roughly round, it adds to the rustic look and tells your guests that these are really home made!
5.	Brush each liberally with some olive oil; extra virgin is best
6.	Thinly slice some peeled garlic cloves and scatter over each pizza round, sprinkle with sea salt and finish with a thin layer of grated cheddar
7.	Place carefully (remember it will be red hot!) onto the baking tray and bake for 5 - 10 minutes until the cheese has melted and the pizza base is cooked and crisp.
8.	Remove from the oven, allow to cool slightly and enjoy immediately

Chef's Tip

You might not like garlic or cheese, or maybe you like butter instead of olive oil; so here are some of my favourite alternatives, why not try your own :

• As above but with a little seeded mustard added

• Finely chopped sundried tomatoes blended with butter

• Finely chopped olives blended with butter

• Lemon and parsley butter

Baked garlic ‘paté’

This is an interesting use for garlic and as will be seen, it is best if bulbs with large cloves are used or better still use an elephant bulb, use one bulb per person. Do not fret about over powering flavours, baking the garlic sweetens it by intensifying the natural sugars.

1.	Pre-heat the oven to 220ºC
2.	With a very sharp knife, slice the top off each garlic bulb
3.	Place onto a baking tray and generously drizzle with ‘extra virgin olive oil’, season with sea salt crystals and freshly ground black pepper
4.	Place the tops back onto the bulbs and place onto the middle tray of the oven, bake for approx. 15 minutes until the cloves are nice and soft (adjust time according to thickness of garlic)
5.	Place the garlic bulb in the centre of the plate, drizzle a little ‘extra virgin olive oil’ and balsamic vinegar around the plate and finish with a large sprig of coriander or flat parsley
6.	Serve it as an appetiser with crisp French bread, crackers or pizza bread (as above but with no topping).

Chef's Tip

To eat, one removes a clove and gently squeezes the flesh out of the skin, eat as is or spread it on the breads

Baked garlic bananas

This dish is a popular breakfast dish on many of the South Pacific Islands here, where plantains may be used (special small, green, immature bananas) but any slightly unripe bananas my be used. The garlic clove may be peeled or un-peeled and I suggest trying the dish with each and finding which suits your palate best:

1.	Pre-heat the oven to 180ºC
2.	With a very sharp knife, pierce 3 to 6 holes in each banana just large enough to push a garlic clove in
3.	Push a garlic clove through each slit
4.	Arrange onto a baking tray and drizzle with ‘extra virgin olive oil’
5.	Place onto the middle tray of the oven, bake for approx. 15 minutes, the bananas should not be allowed to discolour / brown too much
6.	Serve with toast and maple syrup

Join me next week for another great garlic recipe, but until then . . . have a great week and eat healthy.

Enjoy and bon appetit . . . . .

Published 14 January 2002