What I Cooked Last Night

So in the end, people bought cold weather food. Turkeys marched out in droves - if you can have droves of turkeys when they are frozen and encased in plastic - on Christmas Eve. Forget the Boxing Day sales at the department stores. The real bargains were at the fish stall in the supermarket. Crayfish, $35 down from $70. Salmon, $12 down from $28. Oysters, $6.50. By mid-afternoon Boxing Day, a kind south-westerly had shunted Christmas Day's black clouds somewhere else, maybe over the mountains where the last week's blazing fires were still smouldering like a mother-in-law's disapproving frown, and the sun came out and made dappled shadows on the lawn. Just in time for our Boxing Day barbecue. Lime butter salmon, barbecued. Make the lime butter: add the zest of two limes and the juice of one, a tablespoonful of finely chopped parsley and two chopped cloves of garlic to 50 grams of softened butter. Combine and refreeze. Slice into rounds. With your knife blade on the horizont...

Rain was falling in sheets as I turned onto the freeway heading south and east. The road rose towards Bolte Bridge where you can see the city to the left and industry and docks rolling away to the right. The car crested the bridge and then we hit a traffic jam. Half the cars in Melbourne were headed west and the rest east. It was Christmas Day, midday. Even peak hour never jams up like this. I escaped the freeway at Docklands, idled through South Melbourne, turned left at Fitzroy and crossed St Kilda junction to Dandenong Road, veered onto Wattletree, slipped along a quiet, curving Malvern Road and picked up the freeway again at Chadstone. Easy. We were in the foothills of the Dandenongs by ten past one. I parked the car in some slush out the front of the house, a brown tumbled-brick eighties affair with arched windows behind a tall wall with ironwork inserts. There was snow on what would have been the front lawn if drought and extreme heat hadn't killed it. We went inside to get w...

I knew it was Christmas when it was 42 degrees in the Safeway parking lot but inside the store, the checkout girls were wearing Santa hats and Frosty the Snowman was being murdered by someone who used to be a pop singer on the store radio. Jimmy Barnes? John Farnham? John Stevens? Cat Stevens? Neil Diamond? I don't know. I knew it was Christmas when I read in the paper that someone had been complaining that a school had banned the original central Christmas figure, whose name has five letters, to avoid offending minorities and then I read a few more paragraphs and realised they meant Santa. I knew it was Christmas last year when I kept ticking mental checklists of my relatives; but still missed one until 5pm on Christmas Eve, as the store doors slammed shut, when their name popped into my mind unprompted. I knew it was Christmas when I started to prepare the biggest eggplant and potato curry I've ever made and discovered I didn't have a casserole big enough to fit, nor a sp...

The previous night's barbecue was just your usual sit-in-the-garden-and-watch-the-sun-go-down affair. I interrupted the chardonnay to throw a couple of pieces of very good fish onto the hotplate. They cooked quickly. Fish always does. Sear, sear, sear, flip. Sear, sear, sear, slap onto plate. Drown with lemon juice. Eat. To go with the fish, there was a very cold salad of quartered vine-ripened tomatoes, larger-than-usual cubes of very good fetta, eighth-segments of onion and very good fat black olives. That's all. Kind of a minimalist but cubist Greek salad. Which makes no sense at all, but after three chardonnays I always start analysing the food. It was still hot when the sun disappeared behind part of a tree. No cats appeared on the fence. I finished the chardonnay. But there was some fish left over, so here's what I did with it the next night. Curried fish cakes. Ingredients: Two good portions of cold leftover barbecued fish. One of rock ling, the other of salmon. Six ...

The haze is smoke from the bush fires. It sat on the bay for several days like a dirty wet blanket. About a third of Victoria is on fire. The heat of the day was intense and stifling, but there must have been air over the water because the boats managed to slip around each other in slow circles all afternoon. The middle-aged couple did the same for a while.

Some time in the night. The small hours. Maybe one, maybe two. I woke, if wake is the appropriate verb, which it probably isn’t; because although I will usually wake easily after three o'clock, before then I am like the log that has lain on the forest floor for fifty years. Tracy seemed to be feeding the baby in soft light, very soft light. Babies are like that. They wake at night and want food. It’s the one thing I can’t help with. Then, a sound from the other room. The other baby. The older one. The one that is cutting teeth. Molars. They are taking forever. He cries in pain and frustration and his cheeks go red. The molars pop out and go in again, like animals popping their heads out of the ground, what are they called? The golf course ones. I don't know. The sound stopped. Now I am asleep again. Who mentioned golf? Now I am holding a two iron. Driving through. Thwack. A beautiful shot. Straight to the green. I am a champion. Someone shouts: ‘Fore!’ Who can that be? I am a c...

Once upon a time, a chef built a house by a lake. She built the house in a dusty field on a hill overlooking the swampy part of Lake Daylesford. The field was littered with the rusty hulks of abandoned cars and overgrown with blackberry. The house took two years to build and rabbits ate everything she planted. The chef was Alla Wolf-Tasker, whose Russian-Austrian parents had taken her to Daylesford as a child, to visit the spa. She called the house Lake House. The house by the lake. Simple, unpretentious. Lake House. Her idea was to open a little place in the country for people to visit, have a snack, maybe a meal. Open only on weekends. Who would visit weekdays? Nobody. But Alla Wolf-Tasker had worked in France where people enjoyed dining in the regions and she knew they would here as well. She would draw on her Russian heritage, her French training and the fresh produce for which the region is renowned and then see how it worked out. You can only try. People visited. Word got out. Aw...

The Convent Gallery is a fortress of a building. It abuts the Botanic Gardens and looks out imperiously over Daylesford. On a clear day you can see Mt Franklin from one of its balconies. On a not so clear day you wouldn't be looking at the view anyway, you'd be inside having coffee or staring at the art. We did all three. Coffee first, view second, art third. Coffee always comes first. The Convent Gallery used to be a convent and I wondered how the nuns managed to trump the church heavies in getting an even better slice of land than the actual churches. Then I found out the building was not always a convent; it was the Gold Commissioner's private residence. How ironic: the churches weren't king of the heap after all. God came second to gold. The building is not exactly inconspicuous and would have been even more so in 1870, standing out like a ballerina in a bar. Then, in the 1880s the gold boom crashed and the Gold Commissioner left the goldrush town and the Presenta...

It was still light. I walked out of the motel driveway, up the wide empty road to the main street, crossed it at the traffic roundabout near the supermarket and continued up a steepening hill towards the churches. Two stood on opposite corners, ignoring each other and looking down their noses at everything else. In those days churches always got the best real estate in town, high up on the hill, where the atmosphere was a little more refined than down on the main street with the dirt and the horses and the hotels. Other churches dotted the hill, spires jabbing the sky. In the 1870s, probably the whole town spent Sunday morning walking up the hill and down again. Repent; and build up an appetite for the Sunday roast. I passed the churches. Here, the hill gets even steeper. Another five minutes of puffing and sweating and you reach a gateway into the Botanic Gardens which sprawl over nine hectares of hill crown at the very top of Daylesford. I walked into the gardens and along a sand pat...

An arc of motel units could be seen beyond a big circular lawn at the end of a driveway that passed the reception office, which was partially concealed behind an overgrown shrubbery. I stopped the car and checked in at the office and the man, after telling me there was a vacancy and giving me the key to number two, asked conversationally, "Hot enough for you?" There was a metal table and a chair outside each unit. Outside some were sand-filled ceramic planters. They were the non-smoking units. You could smoke out the front. An air-conditioner hummed away over one of the doors, number four, which meant the others were vacant. It was still about 38 degrees and it was close to five o'clock. I like motels. I'm a motel buff. I like genuine fifties, sixties and seventies designs that are untouched. This was seventies messed up with some eighties kitsch and some nineties technology, such as three remote controls, the too-big television and the water-saving showerhead. But i...

We drove to the lake. It's five minutes out of town, to the south west. The road drops down, twists back on itself and you enter a carpark overlooking what used to be a lawn sweeping down to the water. The car drifted across the gravel and came to a stop facing the water. The lake is big enough to be impressive and small enough to walk around if you have a spare half day. Pine trees ring the water, rising away on the surrounding hills like spectators in stands at an arena. There was no breeze and the water was dead flat, almost a mirror. Dark jagged shapes were the reflections of the pines. We got out of the car and moved across the drought-beaten lawn down to the water. To the right of the lawn, under a stand of old pines, an old building used to be something else and is now a bookshop. It sits there in the shade, quietly, and occasionally has a customer. The customer buys a book and wanders out of the shop, trying to decide which particular piece of lake edge would be nice for re...

In the late afternoon, we visited the mineral springs. The sun was lower now, but it was even hotter than earlier. Anything involving water sounded a good idea. The ancient water wells from the depths of the earth, having leached upwards through volcanic rock for 450 million years to emerge as clear and clean as this morning's dew. It has health-giving properties. It's one of the purest mineral waters on earth. The water comes out at metal taps built into a series of rockfaces scattered along a kind of linear sunken garden alongside a watercourse. You can follow the path and taste the water at each of the taps. The taps curve downwards elegantly, like the beaks of Kiwis. You press a pump and the water flows. It does so with a gentle hiss, like a soft sigh from the deep. The water you don't drink or catch drips through a grate and into a drain that leads to the garden. That's why the picnic lawn was so lush. Ironic, I thought to myself, pardoning the pun, You can't ...

To get to Hepburn Springs, you drive down an alarmingly steep hill that descends into what was probably once the crater of a volcano and ends at a gate which bears directions to the car park and the spa centre. The carpark was empty except for a single day tour bus parked cheekily across several empty angle parks. I parked the car as close as possible to a tree, for shade. On a day that hot, the lawn next to the spa centre was possibly the shadiest and coolest place for a picnic in the entire State of Victoria. We threw down the picnic rug and the food cooler and the basket of plates and the cutlery and parked the pram with Thomas in it and sat William down on the blanket and unpacked the picnic: Lebanese flat bread, cold cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber, tuna, cold boiled eggs, home made apricot fruit cake. And thermos tea. Having a picnic is a complicated business but it is worth it if you're organised. We were organised. All the organisation pays off when you have eaten enoug...

450 million years ago, a volcano blew up and left a large hill, not quite a mountain, sitting in the middle of Victoria, and a large, deep lake next to it. 449,999,849 years later, a bunch of gold diggers decided to build a town on the hill overlooking the lake. They called it Daylesford. They built churches towards the top of the hill, a main street level across its brow and a spa centre over the mineral springs bubbling away deep beneath its surface. Despite its elevation, Daylesford was baking in the heat when the Volvo purred to a stop under the canopy of a large tree right outside the Harvest Cafe, just off the main street. We went into the cafe and the screen door banged behind us and we found a table near the window. The Harvest is your alternative cafe with organic and vegan meals and fair trade coffee and a toy corner for the children of the local hippies. Now it has added an organic store, stocking fresh fruits and vegetables, packaged food products and organic wines and beer...

The Western Highway bore on, a black ribbon through a flat dry nothing. Then it dropped into a bowl that used to be a volcanic crater and is now Bacchus Marsh, a small market garden town that relies on whatever water is left in the Lerderderg River, if any. Look out to the right and you can see endless rows of vegetables. They must be getting water from somewhere. Perhaps they're trucking it in. The road lifted out of Bacchus Marsh and kept rising towards Ballan. All the way from here to Ballarat used to be emerald green. Now it's yellow brown. Not so much summer harvest yellow, but more walk-off-the-land brown. We swung off the main road after Ballan and the exit road swept an arc over the Western Highway and pointed north. Now we were into hillier country dotted with the kinds of small towns in which no-one lives any more. Bunding. Barkstead. Spargo Creek. Towns with nothing left except maybe an old church converted into a weekender for people who want to spend weekends in a ...

We packed some things into the car and left on a hot morning, early. The wind was already hot and already dusty. We headed west. You take the Western Ring Road and then you take the Western Highway. There's no confusion. You can't go wrong and you're out of the city soon. But it used to be sooner. Melbourne sprawled north and east, but it never sprawled west. To the north, artists followed the river, enchanted by the light and the mists and the nightlife at other artists' places. Then the bohemians followed the artists and then everyone else followed the bohemians and built suburbs. Orchardists and farmers looked east, enchanted by the Blue Dandenongs, and settled in the foothills or built houses right up there under the tang and crack of the soaring eucalypts and the pines and rebuilt them every few years after bushfires. But no-one went west. Melbourne stopped at Sunshine, which was named after a manufacturer of heavy machinery . Beyond Sunshine was a dusty plain as f...

What is the difference between herbs and spices? I researched the question. Nobody agrees. Here are some of the answers I found: * Herbs are grown in the northern hemisphere; spices in the southern. (That makes the parsley in my garden a spice. Unlikely.) * Herbs are medicinal; spices are not. (Like brandy is medicinal and vodka is just for fun?) * Herbs are the leaves; spices are the seeds. (What about cinnamon? Isn't that the bark of a sub-tropical tree?) * Herbs are or used to be green; spices are not. (I like this simplistic theory - it would save a lot of argument if it were true.) And * If it's in a brown jar it's a spice; if it's in a yellow jar, it's a(n) herb. (Mine are in assorted plastic tubs, cello packets and screw-top clear glass jars.) And from The Guardian: * A Herb is a respected jazz musician; a Spice is one of five talentless C-grade celebrities. Help me out, please, with serious or not so serious opinions.

Cooking fish. It was great. But there were leftovers. Garlicky Fisherman's Pie. I stripped the skate flesh from the cartilage (it's dead easy, I don't know why people are frightened of fish, it's easier than negotiating a T-bone steak), chopped it roughly and blended it with some just-boiled and mashed potatoes, a cup of milk, a good amount of olive oil, some chopped parsley and spring onion and plenty of salt and pepper. Into a baking dish went this glistening fragrant mess. I thatched it with a roof of grated colby, placed the dish into a hot oven and baked it until the cheese was brown and crunchy. Possibly the finest fisherman's pie I have ever tasted. Even if I do say so myself.

The tops of poplars reach away to the east, way above roofs of terracotta tiles. Off to the south, lillypilly canopies turn gold in the setting sun. Birds sqawk and shriek in them. Beyond the fenceline, red brick chimneys poke upwards here and there; while along the fence itself, a white cat moves silently, as if on tiptoes, before disappearing so suddenly you don't know if it was really there. Sit in the back garden and that's what you'll see, if you look around. Of course, you could just sit at the table and have a drink and try to catch up on the week's papers you haven't read yet. That's what I usually do. There could be fifty cats. After a while, the barbecue is hot enough to grill. I use coals and you have to be patient. Don't watch it. Go inside and make a salad and that will speed things up. Barbecued skate in soy, lemon and garlic. Marinate a piece of skate in plenty of chopped garlic, the juice of a lemon and some good soy. I always use tamari. I b...

Wagyu is everywhere, like Bert Newton. But unlike Bert, Wagyu is often mistaken. Wagyu is the breed. It can be bred anywhere. Kobe Wagyu is Wagyu bred to Kobe specifications, but I understand it can be bred and grown anywhere in the world and then shipped back to Japan for preparation to Kobe standards and then re-shipped. So if you are eating genuine Kobe Wagyu, it may be very a well-travelled cow. Ed Charles in The Australian takes an appetising look at preparing Wagyu in various cuts at Jamon Sushi in South Yarra: Our first taste is a tartare of chopped fillet sitting on top of an upturned shiitake mushroom. Easy. The next dish is more of a challenge: cooked tongue cut from the tip as well as a slice from further down the organ. Generally, wagyu doesn't taste beefy, yet the firm tongue tip is just that. The other cut is softer. We are also given chunks of muscle from the tongue's root, which has the texture of leftover roast beef. Bit of a change from the jellied tongue s...

Yesterday was 36 celsius. Today's forecast top is 39. Less than a week ago some parts of Melbourne failed to top ten degrees, meaning there has been a variation in daily peak temperature of thirty degrees celsius within the same week. Are other places like this? I like variety but this is ridiculous. I pegged out a load of washing this morning and it was dry by the time I got all the way around the rotary hoist, like the guys painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge. * Last night I made up a pasta dish from things we had in the fridge. Kind of a mixture, but let's call it pasta nicoise. I slowly fried some red capsicum strips, right down low so they didn't burn; boiled some diagonally cut crisp green beans; sliced some previously boiled new potatoes (they were in the fridge, excess from a weekend potato salad) into quarter inch discs and boiled some penne until it was done. To complete the dish, I drained the pasta leaving just a tablespoon or so of the cooking water in the pan, ...

The US Chief Weather Forecaster and part-time filmmaker, Al Gore, is in Melbourne again and to honour his visit this week we have put on EVERY kind of weather. He'll go home either very happy or very confused. (Mr Gore informed The Age newspaper that Nuclear is Not the Answer . Sixty years after bombing the crap out of Japan, the US tells a small foreign country that nukes are not the answer for non-military purposes? The Japanese would be amused.) * Meanwhile, over at Kitchen Hand's place, it was dinner time. It had been raining and hailing and sleeting and snowing all day, as if it couldn't make up its mind what it wanted to do. And it was cold, the mercury hovering around nine degrees celsius. Just the right weather for: Steak with Green Peppercorns. Take two steaks - porterhouse is ideal but I used eye fillet - and sear them in a little olive oil and butter to your preferred doneness. I like mine blue, so thirty seconds either side on a very hot pan or grill is enough. ...

Well, it's frozen and slippery so it might as well be snow. Like the car? It's completely original and has over 440,000 kilometres on the clock or whatever that is in miles. The right headlamp guard was taken out by a cockatoo (might have been a galah) early one morning in 2002 on the Northern Highway just south of Elmore and I haven't been able to find another since (the guard, that is - there are still plenty of cockatoos around). I'm thinking of removing the left one to even up the look of the car but let's not rush things. Here's the front lawn:

I can't believe that in three weeks we had a new baby, the 'old' baby was sick for five days, my sister finally formalised her divorce, the new baby caught and recovered from bronchiolitis, my mother finally booked in for serious surgery, my oldest son flew to Finland for another three weeks work and the weather turned cold again. I think I did some work as well. Also, they ran the Melbourne Cup. A horse won. So there hasn't been a lot of posting of actual recipes. Let's resume with a good one. I don't know why home-made pasta frightens some people. It's not that hard. Quite frankly, when you've done this a few times, it's easier than putting together a Sunday roast. Make the pasta. First we will make three sheets of pasta, each of a different colour. Each will take a cup of plain flour, half a teaspoon of salt and an egg. For the green pasta, add two tablespoons of leaves - rocket, spinach, basil, whatever you have. For the yellow, half a teaspoon o...

When I saw this shot of Janis Gore's family, I thought: bring out those old photos. Here's mine. I'm front and centre, age eight. The two older children are not in the picture; possibly one is behind the camera. The youngest is three years away from being on this earth. Over to everyone else.

In today's Melbourne Age was this article about collecting cookbooks, featuring a specialist bookshop called Books For Cooks. The item appears in the Money section rather than in Epicure (which itself can be found under the Entertainment tab rather than Life and Style on the paper's website.) Whatever. The article's author nails an eternal truth: An example of quality is the "beautiful, elegant writing" of Elizabeth David whose books, he believes, helped changed the way the English-speaking world thought about European casual food. How true. It's always about the writing, no matter the subject. People want to read good writing. But then: Books classed as "different" include publications such as the Liberace cookbook. White says this type of book tends to be collectible because it's "quirky and unusual and there were only one or two print runs". So even though a book might not have sold because it was rubbish, its very rarity ensures co...

By paddling in the freshly watered garden bed. He loved it. It's okay, it's clean dirt. The hot bath afterwards was fun, as well.

Well, it hasn't exactly invaded yet. So far it is just sitting in the corner. I put my Gold Bunny in on Thursday, the day it rained more than for the whole of October, so it should be off to a good start. It will eventually cover a fence and be seen from inside the house, a cascade of glorious yellow.

They stole an hour from the morning and gave it to the night. Waking at five thirty to brilliant sunshine was nice, but ultimately a waste. For one, I don't always wake at five thirty and for two, there's not a lot you can do that early. I mean, you can go for a walk or plunge into the sea or make a cup of tea and sit out on the porch and watch the birds messing up the garden beds and throwing the mulch that you swept up only last night all over the pathway; but you can't have a barbecue. But you can at night. Summer's first barbecue is just for practice. Just to check everything out and see if it still works. Just to see if you still know how to light a fire and not make clouds of white smoke or singe your fingers or burn the place down. The old iron barbecue is still as solid as a supercharged Bentley , and nearly as heavy; but the outdoor table has cracked and will need replacing. The view hasn't changed. The poplars rise over the line of rooves and shimmer gold ...

Ring. Ring. Hello, classifieds? Yes, I'd like to place an ad. Pardon me? The 'Celebrations' or 'Milestones' section? It's a birth notice, so I suppose it could be in either. You decide. It's your newspaper. You'd like to start with the surname? Sure. It's spelt K - E - ... pardon me? Larger point size? To make it more prominent? It's a birth notice, not a used car ad. (PAUSE) No, I'd feel like I was putting all those other new babies in the shade if we ran the surname in 72 point. Thanks anyway. The text? Sure. I'll read it out to you. ... born October 23. Thanks to all at ... excuse me? 2006? Yes, I do know it's 2006. I wouldn't be placing the ad if the baby was born in any other year, would I? (PAUSE) They what ? People like to cut out the ad and blow it up and place it on the wall and that way they know what year the baby was born? I see. I think. Then again, I suppose people forget their children's names as well. OK, now,...

I'm really not good at posting pictures. If it's not sideways teapots, it's something else. The first post with Thomas' picture disappeared into Blogger space so I created a new post. Now I realise it was there all the time, so there are two pictures and posts, nearly identical, but with a couple of minor variations like those 'pick the difference' puzzles they used to have in the newspapers years ago. * Thomas came home on a cold Wednesday to a warm house, but I was out again almost straight away to take William, who had become ill over the previous twelve hours, to see Dr O. Unusually, there was no wait when we arrived at Dr O.'s rooms late at about six o'clock. However his waiting room looked like eighteen toddlers had had an afternoon party there without any adults present. Dr O. has more toys and books in his waiting room than the average department store toy floor, and none of them are put away. Most are the same ones that were there when I took m...

Here he is, sleeping in his white wicker bassinet which sits in filtered light near the window in the front room. We have had a sustained cold snap after last week's heat and he is well rugged up. Dream on, new baby.

Here he is, sleeping in his white wicker bassinet which sits in filtered light near the window in the front room. We have had a sustained cold snap after last week's heat and he is well rugged up. Dream on, new baby.

... whose name is Thomas. Thomas came along on October 23 at about a minute, maybe ten seconds, before midnight. Thomas is red and chunky and has dark hair and a good appetite and a sweet little cry that sounds like, I don't know, a large mouse, a tiger cub, a baby eagle in the nest? Kind of husky with three different notes. He is a healthy 9lb 6oz or 4600 grams, which is a lot of grams when you think about it. Tracy certainly thought about it - she is only a tiny slip of a girl and we thought William had been large at 9lb 1oz. Nevertheless, all went well and Tracy didn't end up attached to a forest of tubes and drips and wires and as many medical instruments as they could cram around her bed like she did last time. This time there was just her and the midwife and a soft light in the corner and the gentle hum of the hospital airconditioning; and afterwards, the baby laying on her chest, eyelids opening and closing on deep brown newborn eyes. There will be a photo in the next da...

Melbourne experienced its largest earth tremor (it takes no regional 'u' while favour, colour, labour and rumour do: why?) since 1961 around 10.30pm last night. Radio talkback callers reported rattling china. Maybe my teapot knew something after all and dropped its handle ahead of time. Chez Kitchen Hand, we didn't hear or feel a thing. We were all tucked up in bed and sound asleep after a delicious Sunday night supper of smoked kippers with buttered sourdough bread and mashed potatoes on the side. I poached the kippers and added some butter and parsley to the water at the end, reduced it and poured it over the kippers, adding some capers and a squeeze of lemon. There is something very Sunday night about a meal like this. (By the way, ignore the dateline. I must fix it. It is Monday morning here right now.) We are already operating on Eastern Summer Time around here, rising with the sun, craving lunch around 11 and planning dinner by 6 o'clock. This morning we were a...

I bought it at a Myer annual sale many years ago. The maker is Duchess, the style is Genevieve and it is numbered 426 and marked Bone China and Made in England . As you can see (although you would see better if I could learn to post a picture the right way up) my teapot still looks brand new, because I look after it very well. I rinse it after every use and sit it on the mantlepiece above the stove to air dry, next to the grey and yellow canisters containing, respectively, flour, sugar, coffee and tea. This sturdy, trusty vessel has poured approximately 87 billion cups of tea, of which I personally have drunk about 86.9 billion. That's a lot of tea. In fact, that amount of tea would fill the Thomson Dam, which is almost empty , raising the question: am I responsible for the drought? I think am! I've drunk all the water! In cups of tea! Anyway, let's not worry about the drought just now, because there is a more pressing issue at hand: the teapot broke! Quite some time ago, ...

We started cooking for William immediately he was ready for solid food. When we tried him with bottled or canned baby food, he refused it and hasn't had it since. I don't particularly object to store-bought baby food, I'm sure it's nutritious and balanced with vitamins and minerals and will guarantee your baby grows up strong and healthy into a 6'9" Essendon full-forward, even if she is a girl; and has no additives or chemicals and uses only free range chickens and organic vegetables and the label on the jar is recyclable. It's just that it tastes like ... canned baby food. Now he just eats what we're eating. Meals evolve. The other night we made a basic meat ragu, kind of a bolognese sauce, I suppose: minced pork and veal, canned tomatoes, onion, garlic, parsley, grated carrot, grated celery); and he ate that with some tiny pasta mixed through it - stellini, I think they were. Half the rest of the meat sauce we ate with some quick home-made gnocchi - j...

Broad beans were a kitchen staple 6000 years BC, Wikipedia tells me, but what would Wikipedia know about 6000 years BC? It's only been around since, what? Two years ago? Five? However, I have solid evidence that they have been around for at least 45 years; because my mother has been cooking them for that long. We grew up with broad beans as a side dish to a main course, for example, roast mutton. My mother cooked the beans for ages. She probably put them on when the roast went into the oven and they were served up next to mashed potatoes and a couple of thick slices of delicious roast mutton (which was drowned in mint sauce made from mint picked fresh from the garden and combined with boiling water, sugar and brown vinegar) and the beans sat there, grizzled and wrinkled like tiny old footballs and they squeaked when we ate them. These days we no longer cook our broad beans until they are like old footballs; but my mother still does. That's OK, she still goes into the bank to g...

October means the Caulfield Cup, extremely annoying hay fever-causing wind and having to mow the lawn every five minutes. This year it means record temperatures. Yesterday was the hottest October day for something like a hundred years. But when I was a child October meant the annual school fete. Held over a Friday afternoon, Saturday and Sunday, our school fete was famous for having exactly the same stalls manned by exactly the same people every year for, I don't know, ten, twenty, fifty years? There was always the same old dear on the pot plant stall selling donated pot plants. After about ten years every family in the school must have owned each pot plant at least once. It was like having them on loan. You bought them one year and donated them back the next. On the groceries stall, another old dear sold packets of Cottees jelly, cans of Biddies peas, tins of IXL marmalade, jars of Pecks anchovy paste and tins of Bear Brand milk. The grumpy old man on the second hand goods stall w...

You are running the hottest new restaurant in town. Two people arrive for lunch. One is a neatly-dressed, well-known writer. The other is a Z-grade celebrity wearing shorts and thongs ( flip-flops to our cousins across the water). Who do you throw out? In earlier times you would have thrown out the latter. Nobody wants to look at someone's toenails, even Z-grade celebrity toenails. But no. They showed the writer the door. Steven Downes didn't like being shown the door. That's fine. Writers write better when they're angry. And hungry. UPDATE Downes comments further, saying he isn't the only one angry at being thrown out. His newspaper's features editor was also told to take the air. The features editor of the country's largest selling newspaper is not a great choice of guys to throw out of your joint (as long as he is behaving, of course. And isn't wearing thongs.) Downes: The Herald Sun – to which I contribute a weekly restaurant review column — is h...

Many years ago, too many to count, when Kitchen Hand didn't know a colander from a coucousier or a baked bean from a beer nut, someone invented chardonnay. I was working in a bar at the time. In those days, when you ordered white wine, you would be asked, 'Moselle or riesling?' This drove me crazy, because I knew there was more to white wine than just moselle and riesling: there was hock. Just kidding. In fact, there was a number of other varieties and nearly all of them were better than moselle and riesling - which usually wasn't riesling but something else - but moselle and riesling dominated the market. Then chardonnay came along. In the early days it was called the red drinker's white because it had a complexity rarely found in other whites - which wouldn't be hard when you're talking moselle and faux-riesling - as well as a powerful dose of alcohol. At a time when white wines were generally between 9% and 12.5% alcohol, chardonnay was at the higher end ...

We've been in this house almost a year. When we arrived, there was one tree in the back yard, a sad old grapefruit that had long outlived any function and had been badly neglected. At first I thought it was a lemon, until it fruited a couple of big yellow orbs, just for old times' sake. I guessed it was about forty years old, probably a relic of the time when everyone was madly eating grapefruit prompted by some idiot diet plan that was around for fifteen minutes in the sixties or seventies. The tree was a complete mess. It was dense and impenetrable. The branches were on the ground and there was no real canopy, just a jungle of branches growing in on each other. It gave no shade. Last summer there was really nowhere to sit in the middle of those terribly hot days. One of the first things I did when we moved in was to prune it heavily. I removed all the branches drooping to the ground and those up to about three feet up the trunk. Then I hacked my way inwards like the early exp...

I went to a dinner party once where the centrepiece on the table was six asparagus spears sticking out of six long, narrow jars all in a row. What's wrong with that? Plenty. It's dinner, not a game of skittles. I tend to limit my centrepieces to candles or flowers. Call me boring. I've seen pears sitting on flat rocks, miniature hedges of pampas grass that caught alight when someone lit a match, shiny black stones in a clear glass jar like a caveman showing off his life savings, tabletop water features that bubble away all night and giant flat dishes full of water with candles that float around like gambling boats in the bay, all lit up. But I remember the asparagus spears the most because five of them wilted and the sixth was eaten by a guest. So don't so that with your asparagus. Do this: 1. Steamed and simply served on a plate with poached duck eggs, shavings of finest parmigiano and a light shower of freshly cracked pepper. 2. Summer party entree: very lightly steam...

You might or might not have noticed a recently added link at the left. Spike's photoambulism is This Isn't Sydney , the weblog of a man, Spike, who goes on long walks and takes photos. The photographs are magnificent. Spike portrays period houses, landscapes, seascapes, weather, mountains, gardens, fences, whatever strikes him. He has an unerring eye for detail and composition but his work is devoid of the artifice that is frequently seen in photography described as stunning. Spike's commentary is equally devoid of artifice. He is very Australian and calls a spade a bloody shovel. Take a walk with Spike soon. You'll enjoy it.

Most newspapers have a food writer, or more usually, a writer who happens to write about food. Some are good, some ordinary. But who'd want to be a restaurant reviewer anyway? Hello, New South Wales Court of Appeals. This is nothing new. Leo Schofield was sued well over twenty years ago for describing a lobster he was served as an 'albino walrus'. That case would surely be thrown out today, but it wasn't then and Fairfax had to put $100,000 in the tip jar. Freedom of speech means being able to call a crap restaurant a crap restaurant. There's enough of them.

It was a perfect Spring day. There was warm sunshine and a breeze ruffled the white linen cloth on the table set up on the lawn in the garden. New flowers danced in the sun and some early butterflies staggered around in the air. Lunch was over. The adults were sitting around the table having another campari and soda and thinking about another piece of chocolate cake and the children were rolling a ball around on the lawn, except for Canisha and Shanra who were under the table. Why? I don't know, trying to work out which shoes belonged to which guests, I suppose. Canisha poked her head out. "There's a redback under the table," she announced. "Oh," I said. "What's it doing under there?" "Just sitting there in its web," she said, with a slightly sarcastic tone and a shake of her head, as if any adult could seriously be asking such a silly question. I thought the spider would most likely be another, less venomous, one; but I crawled under...

Is: Potato and Avocado Salad . Cold or wam, but warm is especially delicious. Chop four large potatoes - or more small ones - into reasonably thick slices, about the thickness of your little finger, and boil them until just tender, about ten minutes. Drain them and place them in a bowl. Chop two avocadoes into roughly equal-sized slices and combine with the potatoes. Add some very finely sliced greens - I used a few leaves of sorrel and rocket from the garden - and fold through. Now drizzle with three parts olive oil, one part lemon juice and plenty of salt and pepper. The perfect salad for this changeable Spring, when it's warm one minute and cold the next. Try it with grilled fish. * It's been a busy few days. I threw a Surprise Lunch for T.'s birthday and was able to maintain the surprise until under one hour from start time. T. went out for coffee mid-morning and I madly started throwing tablecloths everywhere, hauling glassware out of cabinets, setting up stacks of cro...

They sat in the pot, simmering away for probably half an hour. Blop, blop, blop they went, which is the closest I can come to describing the sound of simmering. I waited until they began to break down, like glaciers in an Al Gore documentary. Then I drained them over the sink and all the steam rushed up and misted the double sash windows looking out over the back garden and for one minute, the new ornamental pear just coming into leaf was all pixillated green. Then I tipped them into the bowl, still steaming. I sat in my favourite chair and sat the bowl on my knee and took up my fork and tasted one. Heaven. I ate six. It was my first meal for a day and a half. Well-boiled potatoes with absolutely nothing on them except the merest whisper of salt. So plain. So obvious. So delicious. Sometimes you have to go back to basics, if only to appreciate everything else.

Kuen (Ken) Cheng was born in China in 1922, fled the Japanese invasion, took a job with the United States Marine Corps, ended up stationed with US troops in Darwin and then either worked his way down to Melbourne or arrived as a personal chef to General Douglas MacArthur during World War II, depending on whom you believe. Given that CV, you'd have to believe anything. Or nothing. By 1949 Ken Cheng was selling his dim sims trackside to brown-suited and hatted punters at Caulfield Racecourse and in local hotel bars after the last race, encouraged by the publicans because they were salty and made the customers thirsty. Ken's dim sims became so famous he realised his customers would come to him instead of he to them, so he set up a stall at South Melbourne market in the 1950s where it remains. Ken Cheng died last week, aged 83 . A big city is nothing without its characters and Ken Cheng was a great Melbourne character. Pass the soy sauce, thanks. And have another one yourself.

It's going around, as they say. It came to us. It wasn't nice. The headline and first two paragraphs are probably enough warning about what is to follow, so if you're still reading, here's what happened: we were sitting there in the lounge room after a lovely dinner - linguine with some ragu, nice and light for spring - when T., who had been idly flicking through a magazine, said she didn't feel so well. Within a second she was propelled back into her chair by some kind of weird G-Force, while at the same time something shot across the room at the speed of light and all of a sudden we had an unfinished Jackson Pollock on the opposite wall. Maybe a finished one. You never know with Jackson Pollock. No warning at all. The bug is like that. T. spend the ensuing hour or two adding to the Jackson Pollock, just not in the lounge room, and then went to bed and writhed in agony. And she doesn't even like modern art. In the morning, I played Mr Nurse and plumped up the c...

I didn’t know he grew up in my suburb, a few streets away, or that he first looked for critters along the Moonee Ponds Creek, where I did, in 1971. (I didn’t want to. It was a school project.) I learned this after his death. Now he has been farewelled and in the words of his brave daughter Bindi, I will never see a crocodile without thinking of Steve Irwin. I’ll just get well out of the way first.

The Monash Tollway used to be the Monash Freeway and before that it was the South Eastern Freeway and before that it was the South Eastern Arterial Road. But it has always been known colloquially as the South Eastern Carpark. If your car is automatic, you don’t actually need an accelerator pedal at all to drive on it in peak hour. You just select ‘Drive’ and your car will idle all the way to the city and all you need to do is to occasionally touch the brake to avoid hitting the 260 km/h-capable Lexus in front of you travelling at an average 7 km/h. Most of the work performed in city offices is actually done in cars on the way in and out of town. Because you don’t have to do a whole lot of driving at 7 km/h. You just have to be there; like a lighthouse keeper, without the vertigo or the stairs. We were on the way out of town on the Monash about ten in the morning, a Friday, heading to the beach house for an extended long weekend. We took the new turn-off that originally just said ‘Cranb...

In the supermarket, bicarbonate of soda is in the flour aisle near the cake-making things (hundreds and thousands, patty pans, birthday candles, etc). I know I’ll forget again.

I was browsing through my collection of old articles torn out of magazines. (Does anyone else do this or is it just me? I have probably an entire old-growth forest of old magazine tear-outs that I imagine I will one day get around to reading - along with War and Peace , A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu and Kevin Sheedy's cleverly-titled autobiography Sheeds .) Anyway, I found an article about turnips by Simon Courtauld, who I must say is a great writer, just so you know I don't keep any old magazine articles about turnips. Courtauld, a kind of forensic food historian (which I suppose would be a forensogustologist) writes that the turnip had been known from Roman times and was at one time regarded as an aphrodisiac. He quotes an unnamed culinary commentator as saying that the turnip 'augmenteth the sede of man, provoketh carnall lust'. Well! Butter me up some turnips, slip into something more comfortable and put on some nice background music. And stop throwing valuable do...

Tea for three: William enjoys afternoon tea in the garden. (You can tell we're in the mountains - the teapot is wearing a woolly jumper.) Way up there in the mountains is a sleepy little village called Wandiligong, but which is known locally as Wandi. Just five kilometres out of Bright, it's so close you can walk there. So I did, pushing William in his three-wheeler. T. drove, being just beyond walking the ten kilometre return trip at this stage. There's not a lot to look at in Wandi if you ignore the breathtaking scenery, the heritage buildings, the river running through the valley, the glorious stands of trees, the spring wildflowers nodding away in the sun and the lilac mountains to either side. There's not a lot to do either, apart from the annual Nut Festival . But there's a tiny shop that used to be something else in the 1800s, maybe a miner's cottage, maybe a post office, which sells interesting things that are not antiques and not curios but something i...