Ann Ipock
            Humorist, author, speaker

Georgetown Times Column

A gift of garlic — or mabe not!

By Ann Ipock May 19, 2004

When my friend Susie recently had a birthday, I wanted to surprise her with not only a colorfully wrapped gift from a local specialty store, but also a gift of food that I would prepare myself — a delicious hors d’ouevre to take to the cocktail party honoring her.
I decided on a dish called “Mediterranean roll-ups” that a friend named Ann had made earlier. With expensive items like tahini, feta cheese and mint, I wasn’t surprised to find the total bill at the checkout was over $20.
Tomatoes, garbanzo beans, tortilla wraps and garlic — lots of garlic — rounded out the recipe.
Now I love garlic, but not everyone does — and the odor can tend to linger. So, I try to eat it only in moderate amounts, even though the hip chefs and savvy alternative health practitioners tell us to eat lots of garlic daily to stay healthy. In fact, haven’t we all heard of cooking gurus being interviewed who always say the three ingredients he/she would never be without in their pantry are garlic, olive oil and parsley? Not me — I’d choose chocolate, caramel and macadamias.
The night before our celebration, I set to work, making a party platter. I realized then that the filling for only four tortilla wraps called for six cloves of garlic. Six! And it just so happened that the head of garlic I’d bought had huge cloves. I decided to use five, but realize now that simply one clove would have sufficed.
That night, my husband Russell (who was sitting 30 feet away, watching T.V.) began hacking, sputtering and coughing his head off. “Are you all right?” I asked, while smashing and dicing garlic, with great enthusiasm. He answered, “What’s causing those strong fumes? Geez, my eyes are burning and I’m gasping for breath here!”
The next day I drove to Myrtle Beach with the Mediterranean roll-ups, safe and secure, in a tightly sealed plastic container that promises freshness. But nothing could promise odorless — at least, not to mask this smell.
Driving to Susie’s house, I swear that strong odor permeated up, over and throughout the car’s interior.
After a while, it was starting “to get on my nerves,” as Mama is fond of saying, but I kept driving, leaning into the air conditioning vent for temporary relief.
Susie met me at the door. Was it my imagination, or did I detect a slight cough coming from her when she reached for the container? She thrust the dish into her refrigerator as I left for a book club meeting.
Returning two hours later, I found her ghostly pale. “Are you OK?” I asked.
She took a deep breath, then abruptly said: “I can’t eat what you brought me, Ann, I’m sorry — too much garlic, and garlic keeps me awake at night.” She retrieved the odoriferous oddities and shook them at me — as if to say, “There! See what I mean?”
Surprised, I took a step backwards.
Susie said even with the lid sealed, and the refrigerator door closed, she could still smell them.
With no “roll-ups” to feast on that night, we still enjoyed Brie cheese, wheat crackers, strawberries and macadamias (the latter, a gift from me). We laughed at the thought of that much garlic in one person’s body.
But I hate to waste food, so I asked her if her husband would want them? “No,” she said, “that garlic gets down in his skin and no one can stand to get around him.” “What about your daughter?” I asked. “No, even though she is a vegan, she doesn’t like garlic.”
So, I drove back to Pawleys Island with the ghastly gourmet, and plunked them down in my refrigerator once more, thinking “Out of sight, out of mind.”
The next day, I took them out of the plastic, and suddenly felt motivated to “rescue” the dish.
Reasoning that I could mask the odor with neutral-smelling foods, I unrolled the roll-ups and began repairing them.
I diced a handful of parsley, opened a new can of garbanzos, and squirted juice from a whole lemon; then threw in some arugula for good measure.
I added the new and improved ingredients to the reeking and rejected disaster.
I tested them: Not bad. I forged ahead, eating two. They were fine — well, sort of. As you can see, I’m still here. But to be honest, that garlic was so powerful, so pungent, so clingy that I’m afraid all I did was merely spread the smelly garlic into the added ingredients.
Obviously, I couldn’t get rid of the odor, or the aftertaste.

When I finished lunch, I munched on half a bunch of parsley, sucked on a lemon, brushed my teeth twice, flossed once, and now I’m thinking about drinking drink a bottle of Listerine.

It’s a good thing Russell has a meeting tonight and will be home late — the way I figure, I can get in five more tooth brushings if I hit it right, every hour on the hour. If he thought the fumes were bad a couple of nights before, just wait till he experiences my breathing.
He’ll be a goner, for sure.

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