Off the Radar

by Te Radar

  My big shiny new barbecue came about because I realised that if I was to have any chance of feeding my family on Christmas Day, I would have to take some drastic action and invest heavily in infrastructure.

  I did not become the proud owner of a giant barbecue as the result of a spur-of-the-moment descent into consumerist abandon. Oh no.

  I did my research before I shopped around, found one I liked, and bought it on the spot. It was the top of the middle of the range: a four-burner monster with side element, hood, cupboards and thermometer. I particularly liked the knobs, which looked as if they were designed by someone whose last project had been to design the knobs of a stereo, circa 1983.

  It looked huge, especially in its box.

  I brought it back to the farm, unpacked it, and began to assemble it. Then I thought I should have a quick squizz at the handbook, just on the off-chance that I was doing it wrong, and because it didn’t seem to want to go together very easily. I realised that the reason it didn’t seem to want to go together easily was that it appeared to have been damaged in transit.

  I disassembled what I had assembled up to that point, and attempted to repack it.

  It’s one of the strange anomalies associated with returning damaged goods that no matter how hard you try, they can never be refitted back into their original packaging. By the time you have them packed neatly back in the box, packed a second box with everything that won’t fit in the first box, and have located the original receipt, the warranty has generally expired.

  With most of it back where it belonged, I returned it to the shop where my worries about a confrontation were allayed by the salesman, who simply looked at it with a resigned expression that said, ‘Wow, another one, what a surprise’, and replaced it without question.

  Without doubt, this entire affair has increased the size of my carbon footprint to clown-shoe-like proportions.

  By the time I finally had it assembled, the floor of The Chapel was lost under a mountain of packaging, and the late afternoon sun was glinting off the barbecue’s metallic surfaces.

  I stared at its potential. I now felt like I could entertain.

  So long as I remembered to fill the gas bottle.

  While the feta is maturing, I have time to deal with a more pressing crisis. I intend to serve boneless lamb and turkey, both roasted and smoked. But I can’t really serve only meat for lunch. I’ll need a range of side dishes and desserts. All I have to do is figure out quite what those sides and desserts are going to be, based on the very limited amount of produce I have.

  Once again, I need a wise woman, and lo, like a mystical yuletide vision, she appears in a late-model red Mercedes and snug jeans.

  Annabel Langbein is the answer to a number of needs I have. Trained as a horticulturalist, she trapped possums for a living before becoming the bestselling author of a number of food books. What more could I ask for?

  She is here to restore hope where there is only the fear of my inability to feed my family.

  ‘Welcome to my Christmas catastrophe,’ I say, indicating my scruffy garden.

  ‘It’s not looking that flash,’ she agrees, in what I consider to be a masterly understatement.

  As we stroll through the gardens, Annabel laughs at my beans, is dumbfounded at the poor state of my rhubarb, and can’t help noticing the lacelike quality of my silverbeet.

  ‘Lucky we’re not relying on you to feed the world,’ she says.

  Thanks, Annabel.

  I’m feeling a little demoralised. It isn’t supposed to be like this. But as we walk around she points at edible things where all I see is foliage. It is astonishing to walk around the gardens, that only moments before I had been looking at with abject despair, with someone who knows what things are, pointing out edible species that I hadn’t even realised were growing there.

  ‘You need me, Radar’, she says.

  ‘That’s becoming increasingly obvious,’ I reply. ‘Wish you could come and live with me.’

  Kneeling by the potatoes, she asks if I know what bandicooting is.

  I do not.

  She buries her hands carefully in the soil under the plant and they emerge with a plump new potato.

  ‘When you’re harvesting your potatoes,’ she says, ‘you need to get right in under them and take a few potatoes out, but you don’t want the plant to know or it will get grumpy and die.’

  ‘I had been hoping to have enough potatoes to make vodka,’ I comment.

  ‘I could help with that too.’

  She is the perfect woman.

  I scamper along behind her as she bustles though my acres. She points out a stand of tall plants.

  ‘Look at those, they’re Jerusalem artichokes,’ she says, once again falling to her knees and wrenching them out of the ground to reveal a knobbly tuber. ‘You just need to scrub them off and roast them with the lamb. You have to be careful though—they can make you a little gassy.’

  I have been blind to the wonders that are being produced before my very eyes. Not only can Annabel identify them, but she suggests ways of preparing them. She is a ray of sunshine in an overcast garden.

  I take notes for making salsa, lemonade and dessert. By the time she’s ready to leave, I am quietly confident that all will be well, just as long as I don’t poison anyone.

  ‘You have a feast happening,’ she reassures me. ‘I’ll be on my way then.’

  As she heads off up the driveway, I stared at the little notebook in my hand, trying to decipher what it is that I have written.

  It’s the morning of the big day, and I am disappointed to note that Santa hasn’t stuffed my stocking full of any joy.

  I have rather a lot to do before my family arrive, as the place needs to be spick-and-span for them. There’s nothing like a big pre-function tidy-up, and I want the place to be super-spruced, although I realise halfway through the morning that no matter how tidy I make it, Mother will no doubt know how untidy it was before her arrival. Mothers know everything. It doesn’t help that the process will eventually unfold before her eyes on television.

  I have to finish the chicken coop and tidy the gardens and remove certain organic matter the cows have left under the totara, which is where we shall be dining, then round up the vegetables and bake the beer bread and slather the lamb with oil and rosemary and rub the turkey breasts with honey so they can be smoked and prepare some salads and put out the tables and chairs and make sure the plates and glasses and cutlery are in place and make table decorations and prepare the rounded-up vegetables and check the bread is cooked and get the cheese and make the hors d’oeuvres and ensure that everyone has a cup of tea when they arrive, especially Mother and Grandad, and make sure that all the booze is chilling.

  The more attentive readers will be aware that not even in a month of Sundays can I achieve this on my own, not even if I sell my soul (even supposing I can negotiate the rights to it back from Jane).

  I will be eternally grateful to Jane and Deirdre and Ruth for doing all the things I haven’t the time to do, but which through the magic of television it appears I did. Women are so damned useful.

  Within short order the turkey is roasting with the lamb in the barbecue and the potatoes are on.

  I’ve done as Annabel suggested and bandicooted my way around the plants. I slid my hands underneath, and there was potato after potato. What a harvest. It is a gardening triumph.

  It’s funny how the little things can seem to be the biggest victories, and the potatoes are a decisive battle with the land that I have won. I know now that I can grow things.

  I decline to do anything with the abundance of Jerusalem artichokes as I feel my family will never forgive me if I send them all home on a long car journey suffering from the ill wind of the little root vegetable. That is not the particular summer breeze they are after.

  The family arrive early—of course—and I wrangle the kids in to help, and pretty much on schedule, lunch is served.

  By sheer coincidence, this is al
so the day that we have calculated the broody chicken will be hatching the eggs that we have placed under her. We have no roosters, and so fertilised eggs have been purchased from TradeMe and added to the chicken’s little cache of sadly barren eggs.

  The plan is that when the chicks hatch, we will slide the little orphaned turkey in underneath the hen and see if she will adopt it. I’ve been referring to it as a turkling because I have no idea what the correct term for a baby turkey actually is. Jane simply calls it Christmas, which seems appropriate.

  We will be able to tell pretty soon whether Christmas has a fighting chance in the world, as research indicates the hen will either tolerate it, or peck vigorously at its head until it dies.

  With the turkling’s mother in a better place (my family’s stomachs), I cup it in my hands and carry it to the nest the broody chicken has created in the tall grass. Cautiously approaching the chicken with my young nephew Jake, we place Christmas in the crook of her wing, and wait to see what happens.

  Without hesitation she simply wraps her wing around Christmas, drawing him into the warmth and safety of her feathery bosom.

  It is a wonderfully touching Christmas moment.

  24

  Roosters have little to crow about

  I love chickens, but not as much as I love chicken. The question therefore is not whether I will kill some chickens, but when and how. The time has arrived when that ‘when’ is now, and the ‘how’ is to be with an axe.

  I have used that mighty repository of human endeavour and knowledge known as the Internet to research the various options for dispatching chickens, and concluded that the time-worn method of removing the chicken’s head from its body with a sharp axe appears to be the quickest and the most humane.

  It certainly seems far less risky than the methods that advocate wrenching its neck, or taking a thin knife and stabbing it through the roof of its mouth and into its brain. Some people even suggest gassing them, but who has a handy canister of anti-chicken gas lying around?

  The most outlandish proposition suggested in all seriousness by several websites is that before I attempt to kill the bird, I should calm it down by hypnotising it.

  Selecting which bird is to be for the chop-chop isn’t overly taxing, but it does illustrate the inherent sexual inequality of the farm. More often than not, it is the male of the species who is slain, as they are of less use than the productive females. Hens lay eggs, and cows bear calves and milk, but their respective menfolk do little but fight and attempt to make love.

  Or fight while attempting to make love.

  And when they are not doing either of those two things, they are generally lying around doing very little.

  I’ve had my eyes on the chickens from an early stage, trying to figure out which of them are male. As they have matured, it has become fairly clear which ones they are.

  As pre-pubescent poultry, they first began experimenting with their crowing, and the ones whose voices were breaking didn’t quite manage to add a ‘doodle doo’ to a strangled ‘cawkle’. They were blissfully unaware that in doing so they were dead chickens squawking.

  It is only a question of which of the roosters it is to be.

  Two of the five roosters have disqualified themselves from the selection due to general oddness. One has blossomed into a small but paunchy, long-necked, grey bird, who struts around with the demeanour of a young Napoleon.

  When he was a young chicken, I had thought that he was deformed, for it seemed that his head was on back to front. He would try to walk, but as his eyes were facing backwards, and his legs were moving forwards, all he managed to do was look positively perplexed for a few seconds, then fall over. How could I not have been smitten with the little guy?

  The other bird that has saved himself from the block is a bigger, more conventional-looking rooster, but he has feathers growing all the way down his legs and out along his claws. They remind me of the sideburns that Hugh Jackman wore as Wolverine in the film X-Men. The name has stuck.

  These two chickens have captivated me, for I realised at a young age that the creature that could draw attention to itself for being different, or quirky, could, if it was lucky, have a more charmed existence.

  When I first arrived at boarding school, there may have been other boys who were as frail and as sensitive as me, but I alone was ginger, freckled and bespectacled. I certainly didn’t need a sign that said ‘I’m different from the other boys’ to draw unwanted attention to myself.

  As with the chickens, the fact that I was unlike the other boys had its advantages in surviving the killing fields of the dorm rooms. An older boy, generally considered to be the toughest in the school, decided that he would take me under his Old Spice-scented wing. This ensured that I was his, and his alone, to torment, or protect, as was his whim, and it was often his whim to do both simultaneously. He was like the older brother I never had.

  As my other male chickens are relatively unexceptional, I have formed no attachment to them. Whenever I look at them, all I really see are different portions of chicken, prepared in any number of ways.

  Which of them I select for my inaugural home-grown chicken dinner will come down to whichever of them I can catch first.

  With the hour of the wretched rooster’s demise looming, I have honed my tomahawk to a razor-sharp edge, and as I trudge to the chicken coop, I can’t help but think of a line from Macbeth: ‘If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly.’

  I have chosen to feed my brood later in the day, so that now, at the appointed hour, I can entice them all into the coop. With their heads in the feed tray, I pounce.

  It always amazes me that when held upside down, the chicken will cease all resistance. It’s as if the pressure of the blood on their tiny brains is too much, and they simply cannot process why the world has suddenly become so disorienting.

  The rest of the flock seem totally unperturbed by their mate’s sudden disappearance. It’s as if he was never there.

  The chicken’s inability to function while inverted means the whole process is conducted with a quiet dignity, or at least as much dignity as executing a bird condemned by his sex to an early axing can have.

  I carry him to the stump, lower him down so that his head and neck rest on the wood, and promptly separate said head from the neck with a single swift thwack of the axe.

  As the legs of the bird convulse spasmodically and his wings engage in a frenzy of flapping, flipping traces of blood across my face as it squirts from his neck, I turn to Jane and say, ‘I suspect we won’t see that bit on the telly either.’

  ‘No,’ she agrees, ‘we most certainly will not.’

  Plucked, he is a little leaner than I had imagined he might be, but it comes as no surprise. My brood are an energetic and freely ranging bunch whose territory encompasses a broad swath of paddock and section.

  While all the exercise means they are a little leaner, I do encourage this, as it means that while they roam around, they are fulfilling their roles as a feathery buffer protecting my crops from the incursions of snaily and sluggy predators.

  Of all the meals that I will prepare on the farm, this is the one I am anticipating the most. I’ve known from the moment I arrived and realised I would be eating my own chicken, exactly how I will prepare it.

  I intend to butterfly my chicken, and roast him. The process of butterflying a chicken—essentially cutting out the spine and opening up the bird so that it looks like a butterfly—is a technique I have picked up from the Internet. It’s simple and quick, and results in a lovely, easy-to-cook piece of chicken that is also easy to divide when the time comes to serve it.

  I’ve even waited until I’ve been able to construct a special oven for the purpose from an underrated, totally sustainable source—mud.

  Mud is fabulously versatile. It’s an entirely renewable resource that can be used to create magnificent structures. I intend to use it to satisfy a grudge I harbour against television chef Jamie Oliver
.

  One evening, while watching an episode of his Jamie at Home series, I watched in horror as he whipped up a wonderful pizza and some bread, and then smugly popped them into his large outdoor pizza oven to cook.

  I was aghast. ‘Who in God’s name can afford to plonk a pizza oven in their back yard?’ I shrieked at the television. From Jamie’s smirk it was clear that he could.

  As it turns out from my research, anyone can have a pizza oven for very little cost and only a modicum of effort. All you need is a little mud, some river sand, some straw, and a back yard. You could in theory site one of these on the balcony of an apartment, but I suspect the neighbours might get a little antsy. No doubt they could be won over with some of the delicious food that would emerge from it.

  The other prerequisites are a small amount of time, and having no qualms about getting dirty.

  While in Mali I had the great pleasure of encountering the world’s largest mud building, the Great Mosque of Djenné. It is a massive monument to mud in a country where mud seems to be the main building material. So large is it that up to 3000 people can be accommodated in its main prayer hall. No doubt they all pray occasionally that the mosque will not fall down, or wash away.

  For most of the year, their mud buildings are ideal structures, providing cool respite from the scorching Saharan heat during the day, while remaining warm at night. When the rainy season arrives, the weather seems to do its damnedest to wash their houses away. In a not-so-vicious circle, this simply produces more mud, which they can then use to patch up their houses.