tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-60584462009-11-23T16:58:52.744+11:00Why does food taste better outdoors? Why do supermarket products have labels that say 'Same great taste, exciting new packaging' but never 'Great new taste, same old packaging'? Why are dieting books ('what not to eat') outsold only by cooking books ('what to eat')? I don't know. But I can tell you what I cooked last night, among other things.writernoreply@blogger.comBlogger895125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-84733317419881381252009-11-23T15:26:00.004+11:002009-11-23T15:30:28.379+11:00

A tabloid liftout entitled 'Dream Houses' in one of the weekend papers described a property by the sea as a 'luxury-ladened beach house'.

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I stacked the coals in the grill over a firelighter, lit the firelighter with a match and walked back inside to skewer some chicken for kebabs for the barbecue. *Chicken kebabsI skewered one cube of chicken breast, one segment of onion and one square inch of red capsicum in that order; repeating until four large skewers were loaded, and shunting the ingredients close together as possible on the

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A buzzing noise, like a loud mosquito coming up the street, got closer and then stopped outside my house. The postman reached across the pelargonium hedge to the letterbox and then buzzed away again on his Australia Post Honda motor scooter. (A friend of mine has a Honda scooter; he loves it. He told me it runs on nothing and you don’t look like you’re pretending to be someone when you park it

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"Cynthia opened the oven door and poured more hot gravy over the roast before lambasting Roger following an argument about a mint sauce recipe. Did it contain sugar, or not? They ran a successful real estate empire of eighty offices between them, but could never agree about the smallest things."

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Sunday evening. Almost dark. No breeze. Warm. Embers still glowing in the grill. The helicopter had started earlier. It made low arcs in the sky stabbing the ground with a searchlight that swung around like a drunk wielding a light saber. Its engine made a nice clean treble chop, chop, chop on the approach and a rumbling bass whirr on the ebb. Sometimes this makes the glasses rattle in the

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Home-made gnocchi with leek and tomato sauce.Cut a leek through the middle twice at right angles and then slice it to produce quartered rounds.Sweat this in a heavy pan with some oil, a chopped onion, a stick of chopped celery and a scored garlic clove. Five minutes or so, just to soften. Now add half a large jar of passata, or a can of diced tomatoes, stir it through the leek mixture and cook it

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It was one of those trivia quiz nights, where you form teams of seven or eight and sit at round tables while an MC fires questions from a microphone on the stage, and you try to be the first to hit the buzzer. The rest of the time you eat Bega Bar-B-Cubes and kabana on toothpicks from platters in the middle of the table and drink warm sauvignon blanc from disposable tumblers. I'm not sure why. It

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'The blog is a soapbox, not a story.' They cut down forests to print sweeping statements like that. So declared Ben McIntyre of The Times (reprinted in The Weekend Australian November 8-9, courtesy of Rupert Murdoch who seems to own every newspaper in the world). Ben had opened the paragraph in which the above sentence appears with the following statement:'Storytelling is the bedrock of

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30 degrees at 7 p.m. and not much wind. Let's eat out. And let’s see how the boys are at outdoors dining this year. Seems not so long ago at least one of them was asleep in a pram at this hour. Time goes by so quickly, not slowly.I like to commence the barbecue season with my personal King of Fishes - Tasmanian Atlantic Salmon. The cost of this fish stops it being an everyday choice, but it is

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I have a collection of old photographs, many taken by my father. I may as well put them here. The above picture, taken by my father during an Inverloch holiday in the summer of 1969-70, shows my younger sister feeding the baby of the family. Behind them partially obscured on a deck chair is the second youngest. My sister was six that summer, so that makes the boys almost two, and four and a half.

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Oddly coincidental fact of the day. Or coincidentally odd fact of the day. Or just plain odd: My last six addresses have been situated on exactly the same longitude. From residence one I went north, north again, then far north; then a long way south, almost back to the middle north; and then a little further south again. But all within a second or two of longitude. All by sheer coincidence, of

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Beans take a few months to grow, and then you have enough to feed a suburb. Unless you preserve them and who can be bothered doing that?Our childhood household had a preserving set that was thrown out unceremoniously during the Great Food Revolution of the 1960s, when everyone abandoned vegetable gardens and turned to the supermarket for salvation. It was called liberation, from chores and

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Ward Four South on a cool spring day. I’m sitting on a chair next to my mother’s bed. The doctor had called me a couple of hours earlier to tell me the surgery had been completed and all was looking fine. He sounded jovial, like someone who has just come into the clubhouse after eight rounds of golf. There are tubes and clipboard charts and electronic bed elevation controls all over the bed and I

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Three or four weeks after the scan. The required procedure or operation or whatever they call it was a laminectomy, which sounds like what you do when you renovate a 1950s kitchen, but is actually a way of easing pressure on the spinal nerve where it was being squeezed by the spine at the neck where it passes close to the gullet, or was it the oesophagus? The procedure was required soon, because

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I was sitting in a waiting room in a hospital again. The parent this time; not a child. Again the waiting room was empty. Again a television was talking to itself in a corner, like a mad vicar preaching to an empty church. Again there was a sign that read Do not touch television controls. Again I switched it off. It was eight o'clock at night. My mother had the last appointment of the day. I had

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One-inch pillows of fresh salmon, poached ever so gently in a little wine and garlic. Strips of avocado added to warm through. Egg noodles cooked until just done, drained and draped in ringlets on white plates. Salmon pillows and avocado strips placed in little cairns on the pasta.A little cream in the pan juices, reduced in the wine with salt and pepper and poured over each dish.A large glass of

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Ice-cream on the lawn is always a nice idea, mid-afternoon on a warm spring day. Thomas will be three tomorrow.

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The best food books have just one subject. No, not food itself: I mean a single subject within the vast world of cooking and eating. Here are four of my favourites:CHEESE:I Love Cheese by Teubner, Mair-Waldberg and EhlertRead this book and you may never eat another Kraft Singles sandwich again. There are cheeses in this book that even the man behind the cheese counter at Leo's in Kew may never

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It must have been the reminiscing about Chinese food. Or sitting on top of the West Gate Bridge for two hours. But that night, something fast and tasty was needed on the table.Was there no warning?It seemed the whole of Melbourne was on the bridge, going east or west; not that you can go north or south, but you know what I mean. 'Delay' signs are everywhere at the best of times, but that could

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I can remember, but only just, those distant days of long ago when earlier civilisations - oblivious to the coming of a whole brave-new-world raft of hybrid, clichéd acronyms and abbreviations that were destined to stride the world’s consciousness like a tech-savvy hyper-eco-warrior driving a Toyota Prius to the airport to catch a Jumbo jet to an ETS and CPRS global warming conference on the

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Thomas tried to spoon some of my tea over a bowl of freshly cooked rice, telling me it tastes delicious.There is no Japanese blood in my family. As far as I know.*I saw the movie years ago in Cinema Studies 1 at RMIT's old Radio Theatre in Bowen Lane (probably my favourite cinema ever) and while I can't remember the plot, I've never forgotten the name.

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The travelling poppies have put in their annual appearance, this year a week or two early; deciding to position themselves in the very hot north-facing bed that catches the mid-morning sun, and which last summer saw the demise of the hedge of Pale Lilac Perennial Balsam, Impatiens Oliveri. 2008 poppy here (scroll down to November) and 2007 version here. Seems they're travelling north year by year

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Did I mention the brisket was a touch under two kilograms? No, I didn't. Apologies.

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A hot day. A canvas marketplace somewhere in one of earth’s most ancient lands. The heat of a torturing sun was tempered, only just, by a murmur of a breeze from where - the Mediterranean? Must have been. Aromas drifted on the haze: the sweet tang of dried fruits, the heat-amplified reek of spices, an earthy blend of nuts and grains and flours and grinds, and that must-eat-now scent of seed- and

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Ten to six last Friday. It had rained all afternoon but it was still light behind the heavy cloud. I drove to the supermarket in Sorrento for milk, a can of peaches, a jar of dried basil, some Dargo walnut cheese and a light bulb to replace the ‘eco’ one in my reading lamp that had lasted two weeks before going fffft. By contrast, the ancient cobwebbed one in the porch light at the front door is

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