What I cooked last night.

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Kale and two cheeses in pastry.

Everyone seems to agree that everything you can eat tastes better in pastry. Obvious hyperbolic exaggeration? Or was it a television commercial I once wrote for a brand of pastry in the late 1980s? I can’t remember. Jump-cuts of a kind of dysfunctional, in a quirky way, not an angry way, family making pastries: pastry pies, pastry hot dogs, turnovers, tarts, sweet pastries with raspberry jam and custard and dried fruits; and on it went, a real weekend afternoon cook-up, flour everywhere, and an end-super over the vision reading: everything tastes better in pastry ; then a quick cut to a three-year old on the floor who has found a piece of dropped pastry and is wrapping it around a small doll and all you can see sticking out of the pastry is its hair and its winky eyes; and the super dissolves to the words: almost everything , and then the brand logo. Later, we had to re-edit the end of the commercial to add a still of the family eating their pastries around the table wit...

The empty house.

A hot Friday morning, oddly quiet. On ANZAC Day, everything is closed and nothing happens except a football game at three in the afternoon. Everything before that is forbidden. Odd also, given the previous Friday, Good Friday, had been chaos on the roads, a day to race around and prepare for Easter, go camping, buy chocolate rabbits to hide for the kids, whatever. ANZAC Day, no. State-sponsored faux romanticism is the new religion; the papers, what’s left of them, are full of decrepit hundred-year-olds wearing rotting ribbons and old medals, having lived five times as long as the boys of eighteen and nineteen who threw their bullet-ridden bodies, full of hope and the seed of alpha-children, into French mud, all in the cause of the King. Nothing to do. So I went on a walk, across a valley and three suburbs. And back again. I set off under an intense mid-morning sun, passing houses with half-drawn blinds like sleepy eyes. Through the Vale, past the football ground and diagonal...

Corned beef hash with eggs and cream.

In the beginning this weblog was a place to store improvised recipes that had (kind of) worked - given that I am no chef. Before that I scribbled ideas on scraps of paper and put them between the pages of cookbooks - a random collection that included one with blank pages framed in stock illustrations, in which you transcribed your own recipes. I had dutifully penned in a couple between the parted lettuce leaves and artful scatterings of peas and shards of cheese; and then shelved it. I could not throw the book out because it had been a gift from someone. Who? I forget. Sentimentality makes you a slave, even to the unknown. Conscripting leftovers was an early gastronomic tic that persists today, given that in this house of coming-and-going teenagers, eating might occur at all hours or sometimes none. On a good day they’ll eat like six tigers; a casserole of stuffed capsicum, the rest of the ham, a cold roast chicken, last night’s pasta carbonara. Corned beef hash, gourmet-style. It...

Little pools of sunshine.

The real estate agent suggested a gardener. I declined. A gardener tends gardens. This is a jungle. So I would take a hedge trimmer and a ‘lawn’ mower and make little pools of sunshine where before there was only scrub, overhang, bramble, thicket. (That makes it sound like it hadn’t been touched for years: far from it. I had been hacking away at its turbo-powered growth for more than ten years . It’s a legacy of the dear departed’s vision for a completely untrammelled garden, Alexander Pope’s ‘unadorned nature’ on steroids.) So no gardener. Nor a stylist. The house will most likely be demolished. A stylist would just be demoralised, like a make-up artist asked to work on a condemned man. So I cut and slash and the years fall to the ground along with the branches and twigs and leaves. ‘One-owner house,’ will project the auctioneer, all grey suit and sharp hair and rolled-up auction blurb to slap on his other hand at ‘sold’. I wrote copy for an estate agent at the turn of the century; k...

Finding Marjorie Lawrence.

We had stopped at Dean’s Marsh on a late-summer Sunday drive to the surf beach at Lorne. I had been curious to see if a small cottage in the town - an early photograph of which I had seen in the autobiography of Marjorie Lawrence - still existed. * Dean’s Marsh? The town I had passed through so often on the way to Lorne in 1978,’79, '80, '81 and '82 with two very small children - their limbs growing longer each year so that they could eventually kick the driver’s seat and cleverly, annoyingly, wind down the windows with their summer-sandalled feet. Dean’s Marsh was the gateway to the Otways - the forest that ceased to be after a Wednesday night in 1983; the night their mother came home from a Hollies concert when the stage had been enveloped in smoke, and the only reason she knew it wasn’t a smoke machine was the acrid smell of burnt eucalypt that filled the auditorium. Earlier that night I had been watching some gritty British black and white police drama on ABC Channel ...

Hofbräuhaus: the sequel.

' ... the Present evaporates continually. It's the Past, distilled, bottled, ... which is eau de vie, the cognac of existence.' - Hal Porter, The Extra . University of Queensland Press, 1975. * It was too dark to read the menu, so I didn't. I gazed out at Market Lane, the narrow thoroughfare our window table-for-two looked out on. In the late-summer light of Sunday evening a cast of accidental actors were taking part in a pantomime; hi-vizzed Indian cyclists, playing oriental kings, bearing gift-meals for hungry baby-Jesus adults reclining in their strawless sky-byres; fast boys spidering into their carelessly parked crackle-exhaust sports cars, having not held the opposite door open for their vacantly-botoxed passengers; skeletal homeless pilgrims moving drug-shakily, like marionettes, towards some dead-end mattressed Mecca. Harlequins, columbines, pierrots, clowns. I took in all this cinéma vérité with a ten-second glance, and then a waitress materialised beside our t...

Irish stew: the sequel.

On occasion over the years I've marked St Patrick's Day with a half-hearted attempt at an Irish stew; nothing much more than throwing a few chops into a pot with sliced potatoes and sometimes carrots and onions. Well, essentially that's what it is: on a sleety cold day in the Emerald Isle even that would raise the appetite. This year, more of the same, albeit with a few extra ingredients. Irish Stew with Leek and Parsnip. (Yes, parsnip, one of my all-time favourites .) Brown about one kilogram, or whatever that is in pounds, of lamb in oil - I used diced lamb steaks because they were on special. Remove lamb and add a tablespoonful of butter to the same pan and saute a chopped onion, a finely sliced leek and a grated potato. When the onion and leek soften add three carrots, three potatoes, and two parsnips, all chopped evenly. Over the vegetables, as you turn them, sift about a quarter cup of flour. This will help thicken the stew. Add a bay leaf and about a litre (ditto) ...

The first time ever I heard the song.

It was engineered like a chamber music performance; appropriately, given Roberta Flack’s classical music background. The production wasn’t lush. It was extremely spare - significant given popular music’s headlong rush towards over-production at the time (even though the track was recorded three years earlier). Flack believed the production to be too slow. The engineer had created a four-minute dream set to the rhythm of a sleeping heart rate in which a lover lies content, dreaming a soliloquy of happiness: or loss? A foreground double bass opens, and a classical guitar sheds teardrops of joy - or despair - in the mid-ground, before piano - and vocal - notes emerge so tentatively you can hear the studio air around them. The song’s string arrangement by William Fischer is extraordinary, blending violas and cello into an emotional counterpoint that could be fateful, anticipatory, ominous, portentous, celebratory, frightening or omniscient … depending on whether the...

Road to the beach, 1963.

The long high road sloping down to the distant coast sparkled with the blinding reflections of sun on an endless snake of cars. Chrome bumpers, body strips, window and door surrounds, bonnet ornaments and petrol caps shimmered and diffracted crazily in the haze of boiling engines and midday heat. A far-off strip of blue-grey - the sea! - underscored a cornflower sky. Later, the car I was in stopped opposite the beach where a line of shops stretched to the horizon. The driver got out, disappeared into one of the shops, probably for cigarettes, came back, and gave me an icy-pole in a wrapper with a picture of a helicopter on it. * Endless summer days. We are sprawled on beach towels, which were probably tasseled and multicoloured - but who would remember that detail? - on the sand in the shade of some kind of building, a yacht club or boat launching house or a covered pier. I lick the last sweet droplets, setting in the heat, from inside the torn waxed wrapper. Next to me, my father crus...

Flavour explosion: stuffed eggplant.

I made the following recipe years ago and then filed it away in the archive, where it remained a vague memory, like a lost game of chess. I found it again one hot day recently when I’d bought three large coming-into-season eggplants; and I made the dish and wondered why I'd eaten ten thousand boring meals in between. In the intervening years the recipe's origin seemed to have moved south from Naples to Sicily and its flavour is Mt. Etna-sized. Rather than the more common, and tedious, mince-and-rice filling, this dish relies on the ability of the eggplant itself to deliver extraordinary flavour thanks to the ingredients it carries. Stuffed eggplant with anchovies, capers and olives. Halve and cut the flesh out of two of the eggplants, leaving four shells with about half an inch of pulp remaining. Peel the third eggplant. Cut the pulp of all three into small cubes and place it into a colander, salting generously. Leave to drain for thirty minutes, then rinse and squeeze out exc...

Many happy returns.

There is an astrological concept known as the seven year cycle, probably the figment of someone’s imagination, like most irrational things are - if you’ll pardon the cynicism - in which some very odd unexplained things may happen amid a whirlwind of change and uncertainty. Last week some research was reported on (see below) in the newspapers (which for the benefit of younger readers are - or were - physical pieces of paper on which was printed ‘content’, produced by people known as ‘reporters’ or - in the case of the more self-absorbed - ‘journalists’). Newspapers still exist: online. If that statement strikes you as an impossibility you are, strictly speaking, correct: publishers continue to entitle their digital reportage a ‘newspaper’ as long it it is gathered beneath one ‘masthead’. Odd, really. Nevertheless an item appeared last week describing the research mentioned above. Some academics at a ‘university’ in some polluted regional city in the north of England (where possibly the ...

Circles of time.

The airless tram stopped, its door peeled open, and I stepped out into the shady archway of the gothic arboresque cathedral formed by the Royal Parade elms. Summer, late afternoon. The sun, scorching, had sailed across 135 vengeful degrees, burying its heat into every hard dark surface that its hot blind fingers could reach. I turned from the shade into a burning laneway, passed the brutalist angled academic buildings of the university and reached the Beaurepaire swimming centre. The building, a modernist cube of monumentally optimistic design, brazenly wears a multi-coloured frieze, an Aztec-like belt of mid-century zeitgeist, as if it were still 1956. As I passed its glass-walled blueness, I sensed, if not heard, the metronomic slap-slap of immersed students ploughing endless laps, subconsciously invoking a curious para-temporality designed to speed their five-year courses to an earlier conclusion. Outside the glass, the athletics track hosts the same time-bending ri...

Comments airborne.

I had thought they went to the moderator (me? a moderator?) via email, but in poking about the entrails of the twentieth-century online word-airport called ‘blogger’, I found them huddled together in their own little virtual waiting room, hatchlings patiently eager for take-off. I ticked them off like a steward handing out boarding passes and off they flew. Apologies for the delay.