What I cooked last night.

Google: there it is, waiting silently and patiently in your device, like an English butler, to tell you everything you want to know. In the old days, you would ask your wise grandmother. Now, she probably gets her information from the internet as well. Example: feeling unwell? Look up your symptoms, then go to the doctor and tell him what's wrong with you. Saves time. Then there's cooking. Everyone googles their dinner. The other night I made Cornish pasties. I had a bit of a look around online. Everyone was saying theirs was 'authentic', as if they had an aunt who had been married to a Cornish miner who liked carrying unwrapped food in his pocket to eat three hours later when he was two hundred feet underground digging up tin. The multitude of online recipes for Cornish pasties insisted variously on skirt, chuck or rib-eye steak; swede or turnip (apparently the same thing in some places); carrot; black or white pepper; potato diced or sliced; frozen peas; thyme; rosema

Yes, of course, the ex-farm girl had killed, plucked and gutted the chickens, boning the meat and setting the giblets aside for soup, without batting an eye. The chickens had been purchased for that very purpose, but they’d been around long enough (for fattening up; not that a bantam gets very fat) to have earned names. There was more to the story. I've omitted some characters. There was another child at the small kitchen table. My grandfather's sister Mary had died, leaving a ten-year-old son to an unreliable father who turned him over to his mother-in-law. My grandfather took them both into his household, formally adopting the child. So his mother (my great-grandmother) is at the table as well, or more likely in the easy chair near the stove. Rearrangement of the single-fronted Edwardian terrace occurred. My grandfather flew around with a hammer and timber and cement sheeting, and Len and his cousin/adoptive brother Robert migrated to the new sleepout (translation: bungalow)

She was sitting in the sun, and her mind rolled back down the decades to the days, when war had ended, of repair and gladness and sadness and regrowth. The sun warmed her, and she told the story. Winny was named after Winston Churchill, and Dynon after the great North Melbourne captain and centreman. Winny and Dynon were small bantam hens. It was 1947. Postwar optimism was co-mingled with severe shortages in materials, building supplies, clothing and food. It was called austerity. Australians were packing food parcels and sending them off to Britain - great and wonderful Britain - source of our laws and our stoicism and our culture and our ... recipes. Len was twelve. He was my mother's younger brother. The bantam hens were his, and they lived in the back yard of the single-fronted terrace in Ascot Street, Ascot Vale, directly across from the racecourse, which had recently been turned over to public housing. Bantams can fly. It would have been easy for them to escape. Len restraine

I’m no vegetarian; I just like eating them (vegetables, not vegetarians). The following salad - or perhaps it is a stew - is based on those small purple eggplants you find in Italian and Middle Eastern greengrocers, and builds on these with sweet-acid tomatoes, earthy pine nuts, and salty brined olives and capers. To make it, I cubed about 750g worth of purple eggplant, placed it in a colander, and sprinkled it with a good handful of salt for an hour, before rinsing it off and frying it in batches in olive oil. Then I drained the fried eggplant on paper towels. Meanwhile, I had fried a chopped onion in another pan and, when almost done, added a dozen pitted and chopped Sicilian green olives, a small handful of capers, a punnet of those mini tomatoes about the size of the olives, a cubed celery heart, and a big handful of pine nuts. I cooked all of this for five minutes or so, adding a little more oil. Then into the fragrant vegetable/nut mixture went the fried eggplant, followed by a t

That list was torture. For every song there were ten others as good. Probably twenty. You can't squeeze them all in. Where were Roy Hamilton, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Al Green, Jim Morrison, Chuck Berry, Neil Young (‘Out on the Weekend’ was bumped for something else), and Willie (‘Blue Eyes Cryin' in the Rain’) Nelson? Where was Van Morrison? (His stunning mindscape ‘On Hyndford Street’ from Hymns to the Silence was in an early draft of the 100.)  Christ Almighty, WHERE WAS RAY CHARLES? AND JIMI HENDRIX? (I tossed a coin for No. 2 - 'Lucky Old Sun' - and Aretha Franklin's version beat Ray Charles'. And where were Randy ('One Day I'll Fly Away') Crawford, Nina Simone, Gladys Knight, Karen Carpenter, Ella Fitzgerald, Ketty ("Love Letters") Lester and Patsy Cline? The obvious top 100 habituees (Rolling Stones, Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Who and others) are on everyone else's, so they didn't need to be in my inconsequentia

Happy 80th birthday, Robert Allen Zimmerman.