Cordyceps, Guinea fowl & the road ahead

There comes a time in everyone life when you need to face reality, you might have resisted this for years, claiming that your too young, too carefree yet eventually you will look in the mirror and stare at the sad truth, cripes I have this desire to go to the home and leisure show.

Even as I write this, tears well, when did this happen, one minute you are cruising along not thinking at all about the path ahead, living in the moment oblivious that there’s an entire industry devoted to track that leads to the end of the road. To make it worse we head to EPIC in the same car that everyone else seems to be driving. It’s not ours, a temporary replacement for my wife’s car I recently cowed and she is still dealing with the pleasant people who look after the insurance. I imagine these individuals as being the human form of a vulture, they must sit by the phone, on a corpse of a recent claimant, planning how many excuses they can find to delay paying you one cent. So the car we have is a Toyota, Nissen or something like that, the model sounds like a female body part. It’s like you’re driving around in a car that’s a cross between an armchair and a coffin, all this polished wood work and everything is engineered; reversing camera, no key to loose, a GPS plus mirrors that move to where its thinks you should be looking,  there’s possibly even a cigar cutter. Well they are popular, we parked in a row of them and headed to the leisure and pleasure show along streams of other boomers.

As confronting as the car was, it was nothing as to what we found inside. I had no idea that the entire retiring population is going to live in a mobile house and have a spa. These incredibly complex mobile homes, trailers and caravans are everywhere, wow, so this is the future, roaming around the country in some sort of Stephen King-esqu world trying to find the last powered site before night falls and the un-homed zombies come out of the bushes to prey on the tardy.

I guess your interest in this as a lifestyle choice is inversely proportional to the square of how long you have been trapped behind a slow moving retired couple who have their names scrolled across the back of the slow moving van and the rest of their lives to get there. Me, I descended into a deep, dark depression. Inside the pavilions – away from all the vans, tented trailers and these spas…what is it that makes sitting in a bath with thousands of discreetly directioned jets so desirable – we find another version of hell. People selling everything from the surprisingly numerous versions of mop and broom, pain relief, gutter guards, vegetable shredders, container sealers to retirement planning, community villages and prawn peelers.

I need to sit down, but not in a personal massage chair or swing that looks like it’s made for a huge parrot cage, put up my feet, but not with any sort of orthotic help, in the shade of anything other than a fruit salad tree. I don’t won’t this amount of planning for the little time we have left, it’s like everyone is either on the verge of retirement or making something to sell to them.

At my lowest point I ran into an old friend, he did some house remodeling  for us years ago when the family was expanding and is now on the verge of, you guessed it, retirement but I knew the he would be doing something interesting, not traversing the Nullabor in a luxury mobile home, towing a spa. Peter has a love of the unusual and we got down talking about his trip of goats he is trying to unload onto unsuspecting folk, and special breeds of chicken, plus, what I’m trying to find to add to my new chook enclosure, guinea fowl.

It’s a personal thing, the type of chook house you build, some, like a Gen Y type I know of, looks it up on the internet, spends a lot of time planning the chicken version of the Taj Mahal and then subsequently looses interest, other’s look for devices that will make their chook yard complete. Like a solar powered door that comes from England and closes when the sun goes down, leaving the dumb ones out in the wilds of the night in a strange Darwinian chicken world. Me, I just converted the kids unused cubby into a pretty good chook house, they even have chairs to sit on, a desk if they need it. Surrounding this I’ve recreated the Howardian detention centre look, Tony Abbott would be proud, nothing comes in or out, we are all safe.

So Guinea fowl are an unusual bird, sort of look like a small turkey and they roost up trees but when you find them can make a particularly fine meal. The flavour is more like chicken than game, stronger though and they have an affinity with cabbage and pork fat. So, I cheered myself up a bit, maybe I’ll go into game bird rearing or even just set up a my own stall here next year. There’s a certain fungus that only grows on the Tibetan plateau, Ophiocordyceps sinensis or the caterpillar fungus. It colonises the larvae of a certain caterpillar, eventually springing out of its mummified head, like a scene from The Thing. Once harvested, dried, ground and mixed with deer penis, it makes a particularly strong libido increaser amongst other things, I reckon it’ll go like the clappers here.

Guinea fowl with braised cabbage, prune and bacon
1 guinea fowl, split down the back.
salt and pepper
½ small red cabbage, shredded.
8 small red shallots, peeled but left whole
4 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
2-3 thick slices good quality smoked bacon
500ml homemade chicken stock
Bundle of herbs: thyme, tarragon, parsley
10 prunes, with pits

In a pan large enough to hold all, fry off the bacon to release some fat, remove and in this rendered puddle of goodness gently fry the seasoned guinea fowl, skin side down, remove and cook the shallots, garlic and cabbage until they are tamed somewhat, tuck back into this the two meats along with the prunes and herbs, add enough stock to half cover the brew, not too liquid, cover with foil or lid and cook in a lowish oven, around 150C until the bird is cooked, around 45 minutes. A particularly fine meal served with steamed chats and something in pinot mold.