So This Is Ginkgo … And A Perfect Number 200

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That is the number when you add the age of my family of four together. Or shall I say, between the four of us, there is a life experience of 200 of years by March next year. I often wonder how much knowledge is lost from one generation to the next. I wish to learn how my father takes those award winning photographs (for real). I wish to learn the art of calligraphy from him and in particularly, his way to compose Chinese articles. And above all, Tai Chi. He has own set of students and from the DVD he sent to me, I saw smoke coming out from his head while he exercised. No special effect I swear.

But to extract these knowledge from my father requires talents. No way I can learn that unless we can each live for another 200 years. Cooking, however, is much easier to do. From young while boys next door spent time outside playing basketball and dating girls, I always enjoyed staying at the kitchen watching my mother cooked. So I may not be able to shoot basketball even if there is a prize of one million dollars nor charm girls on the streets and in the club, I enjoy being able to cook my own dishes each and every day if I want to – for myself and those who stay with me.

Still, I can probably cook only a fraction of what my mother can cook. So while she is in town, what better things to do than to take this opportunity in expanding my repository of dishes? Amongst many, there is ginkgo.

Like my sister who has recently settled in Singapore, I find it hard at times to reconcile what I know in Chinese terms to what are being called in English. Till today. After all, from where I was born, Cantonese is the day-to-day spoken language and nothing else. I first heard the word “Ginkgo” from one of my friends who is in need of some memory booster. He was thinking of taking the ginkgo pills that his mother is taking. You know what life after 30 is like for some of us. People forget things, repeat stories, and repeat the same story to whom he or she hears the story from.

Lately I visited the Japanese restaurant Nambantei (featured in my previous blog) and had ginkgo nut sticks. It tasted bitter and if not for its supposed benefits, I would not have finished it.

I took my mother for Chinese herbs shopping as I wanted a refresher course on soup making. My mother asked if I wanted to eat “白果” and looking at those nuts on display and recalling what I have eaten at that Japanese restaurant, I suddenly realised that “白果” is in fact “Ginkgo”. When we returned home, I volunteered to clean those nuts and it is a rather tedious process as it turns out.

First, the shell is hard. Mere mortals like us won’t be able to crack them with our bare hands. So I armed with a hammer and hit each nut with the right strength. Very much like peeling crab craws. If I hit too hard, I smash the entire ginkgo and it looks pretty gruesome. Healthy ginkgo flesh is soft to touch with a certain moist (the moist left a funny smell to my fingers that smelt like … [censored]). Bad ginkgo flesh is hardened and with black patches. There are attrition in each batch of genkgos. Just throw away the bad ones and keep the good ones.

Ginkgo fresh from the shell has an outer fleshy coating. It is relatively tedious to peel off this coating. The best way is to boil them for 5 minutes. And then peel off the outer coating as well as breaking each ginkgo into halves and see if there is a tiny “stem” inside. That thing is bitter and should be removed. No wonder the ginkgo nut sticks at that Japanese restaurant tasted bitter.

We use ginkgos to cook dessert and I must say, the taste is wonderful. So much hard work in preparing ginkgos. Even though ginkgo has a few good medical benefits (quote from Wikipedia: it improves blood flow to most tissues and organs, protects against oxidative cell damage from free radicals, and blocks many of the effects of platelet aggregation and blood clotting that are related to the development of a number of cardiovascular, renal, respiratory and Central Nervous System disorders), taken in large dosage in a prolong period (5 per day for children) can be poisonous. Like all things in life, consume in moderation.

Talking about the benefit of improved blood flow, this morning I woke up and … [censored].