Rumble in the jungle

We're renovating again. This time it's the lush but messy jungle of gingers ... it has to go. Sorry.

The jungle looks pretty ordinary all through spring. The problem is, once the frangipani tree is bare, and after I cut down the nearby lush lemon grass foliage from its six-foot high peak to a mere six-inch stump, you can see too much of the jungle. For nine months of the year it's almost hidden from sight, but now you can see it too clearly. It is an eyesore of dead brown bits ... lots of dead brown foliage beneath the evergreen canopy. I try to cut it back, but it is a fight to make it look even respectable.

Here's the offending foliage from its best angle, where it almost looks nicely jungle-like under the shade of the frangipani.

And here it is while the lemon grass stalks are just little 'uns in late spring. However, for all of September, October and November, the ginger patch looks messy. It needs a lot of cutting back, and despite that effort it rarely looks very appealing.

My problem was simply that I knew it was going to be an appalling job. I didn't even stop to think about the spiders and other creepy crawly life that might not be very pleased by my intrusion. I just concentrated on how much sheer hard work was involved ... and as it turns out, I was right! 

I'm not young anymore, and it has taken me a few days to cut it all down and dig it all out. Once it's reduced to brown rubble, it doesn't look so big, but don't let that fool you.

The worst part, without doubt, was digging out the roots with a mattock. These formed a dense mat about 3 yards long and one yard wide, and at ground level there was barely any soil. 

And beneath one layer of roots I often found a second, deeper layer of roots. These gingers really know how to build an environmental civilisation.

I scoured my shed for every tool I could find to help reduce the patch to a pile. It was an international effort, with a Japanese trimmer, an Aussie mattock, Swiss secateurs, Korean digger and a Japanese cane cutter.

The electric hedge trimmers removed the top layer of foliage, but didn't have much impact on the canes. The mattock somehow got heavier and heavier each time I picked it up, but in the end, like the forwards in a rugby match, the mattock won the "player of the match" award. I could not have done it without this ancient tool.

This jaggedy-edged scythe is called a Niwashi Shark, and it was brilliant at cutting down the canes almost to ground level. It's a Japanese garden tool, but I bought mine from New Zealand, at http://www.niwashi.co.nz, several years ago, and it is a well-made tool that feels like it is going to last the next few decades that will probably see me out here on planet Earth.

A wonderful all-round digging too, my Ho-Mi was fabulous at tilling the soil and discovering extra layers of roots once the mattock had "cleared" a section. It too feels like it will last a lifetime, and I particularly like the way the blade of my old Ho-Mi looks like it was forged in the Middle Ages. I bought mine online from the Gundaroo Tiller, http://www.allsun.com.au/HoMi.html, at about the same time I bought my Niwashi tiller and my Niwashi Shark — I think about 10 years ago, and last time I checked online they still seem to be in business.

Finally, the good news. For my shady 3 metres of ground, I am planting some hydrangeas. Pammy asked for a white one, but I also like blue ones, so we're buying both. The spot where the hydrangreas will grow will be shady for most of the time, but exposed to the sunshine in late winter and early spring, so I hope it suits them.

I'm glad I've done all the heavy digging to get rid of the ginger patch now. Five years from now I don't think I'd be physically up to the task. It almost killed me this time round.

I kind of like the idea of returning to growing old-fashioned hydrangeas in my dotage. More my pace these days.

Playing chicken

We're into the 700th consecutive day of rain (or so it feels, it might just be the second week) but it's wet in Sydney, folks, and this little gardener ain't doing any gardening right now. The seeds I've sown of the next crops of parsley, coriander and radish are all frolicking in the rain, the lavender inexplicably has decided to start flowering, and none of that is coaxing me outdoors. 

Instead, on this soggy Saturday afternoon I'm playing chicken with one of my favourite recipes, and it's one that I have now cooked several times and each time it has worked out perfectly. The method itself sounds a bit dodgy to Western cooks, but the Chinese have been cooking chicken this way since Confucius was a schoolboy.

Here's some of the ingredients: ginger, garlic,
spring onions and salt. The bottle is of Chinese
cooking wine (Shaoxing), and in our local
Asian grocery it's $1.20 for the whole bottle,
and you use the whole bottle in the stock.
It's like a dry sherry, so I've been told.
Hope that's true (not a sherry person), but the
first time I taste a dry sherry I plan to say
"It reminds me of Shaoxing wine".

The first part of the recipe is dead easy, and normal. Make
a cooking stock (recipe below) but it's the whole bottle of wine,
5 litres of water plus lots of garlic, ginger, spring onions and salt. 

And the chicken itself needs no special prep.
Just one size 16 (1.6kg) free-range chook.

So far so good. Once you've cooked the stock for a while, add
the chicken and cook for... wait for it... 15 minutes! No, it's not
ready yet. What you then do is turn off the heat, put on the lid
tightly, and let the chicken cook very slowly and gently in the
cooling hot stock for 3 whole hours. And it works. The chicken
comes out fully cooked (ie, no 'pink' bits), super juicy and
tender. When I tell people about this recipe most of them
look a bit suspicious and you can tell from their eyes they
ain't never ever going to try this recipe. I don't care, here
it is, and this is what we're enjoying tonight!

White cooked chicken with ginger and spring onion sauce
This is based on a Kylie Kwong recipe found in the newspaper a long while ago. She didn't invent it, of course, an ancestor in 1500BC did, but I have had the temerity to change some amounts, too.

1.6kg whole free-range chicken

Cooking stock
1 x 700ml bottle Shaoxing Chinese cooking wine
5 litres water
12 cloves garlic, crushed
1 cup roughly chopped ginger
1/3 cup salt flakes (eg, Maldon)
8 green spring onions, trimmed and roughly chopped

Dipping sauce
2 tablespoons grated ginger
2 tablespoons finely chopped spring onions
1 teaspoon salt flakes
1/2 cup peanut oil

You’ll need a big stock pot to cook this, preferably one with a heavy base that can hold its heat, plus a tight-fitting lid that does the same.

1. Make sure the chicken is out of the fridge for a couple of hours before starting, so it isn’t ultra-chilled.

2. Put all the cooking stock ingredients into the stock pot and bring it to the boil (that can take up to 25 minutes). Turn down the heat, cover the pot and let it all simmer gently for 40 minutes, to make a fragrant cooking stock.

3. At around that 40-minute mark, wash and trim the chicken of excessive fat if you like. While you prepare the chicken, turn up the heat on the stock so it’s near a boiling again. Add the chicken gently to the pot, breast-side down, then turn down the heat under the pot to medium, so it’s barely simmering, not boiling. Let the chicken poach in the simmering stock for 15 minutes (and no longer).

4. Turn off the heat, fit the lid securely to the pot and let the chicken steep and cook slowly in the poaching liquid for 3 hours. Never take the lid off the pot. Don’t go near it!

5. Well before that 3 hours is up, make the dipping sauce. Combine the salt, ginger and spring onions in a wide, shallow heat-proof dish or pan, then in another small pan, heat the peanut oil until quite hot (but not smoking) then carefully and slowly pour the hot oil over the ginger/spring onions. They’ll fizz a bit in the oil but it all cools down within half an hour.

6. Once the 3 hours is up, carefully remove the chicken from the pot, using tongs, and place it on a plate for 15 minutes to cool down, before cutting it up. I use a Chinese cleaver to chop the chicken into pieces, chopping across the bone. The breast meat is very juicy and tender, so you could just cut off large pieces and slice them, to serve.

7. I serve ours with steamed Chinese broccoli, chopped into chunks, with rice on the side, plus a little bowl of the dipping sauce, which is essential. 

8. The remainder of the chicken makes a sensational cold chicken for salads or sandwiches the next day. The flavour of that ginger-infused cooking stock comes into its own more on the day after than it does on the night you cook the dish, in fact.

9. Don’t skip the dipping sauce; it’s a huge part of the flavour of this dish. It’s a classic Chinese dipping sauce, so you probably will recognise its flavour if you’re a regular at Chinese restaurants and yum cha.