What I Cooked Last Night

QANTAS couriered my brother's lost case to my mother's house - where he is staying - 24 hours after they lost it. Where was it for 24 hours? Had it remained in the spot the baggage handler mistakenly placed it, surely suspicions should have been raised. In all likelihood it was diverted to a subsequent flight. An implanted GPS chip might have been interesting. Meanwhile, I had packed up some assorted clothes and delivered them to my brother. We are much the same size in clothes and shoes. * On Thursday we packed up a simple picnic, placed the boys in their double stroller (we are occasionally asked if they are twins), strolled to the station and caught an empty train into town, got off at Flinders Street, walked down a sunny St Kilda Road, crossed at Nolan Street, entered the Botanic Gardens at the cactus garden gate and found a spot under the impossibly large canopy of an ancient tree in a spreading lawn overlooking the lake. We ate turkey sandwiches. The boys tottered and rol...

They used to be called merely, and possibly kindly, eccentric; but these days, people who display somewhat odd behaviour are apt to be labelled with some medical description, even by people who are not doctors. However, the 'A' word came into even my mind when, on arrival at my mother's house for Christmas lunch, I found ten cellophane packs of patterned paper plates stacked up on the sideboard. Thanks to my late father's career as a sales representative with a catering supplies company, my mother has the world's largest collection of fine crockery. So what was with the paper plates? I don't want anyone washing up on Christmas Day, she explained, which had a certain grim logic to it, but have you ever tried to cut roast pork on a paper plate? Of course, I had wondered, when she returned from Turkey earlier this year with a badly gashed leg which had landed her in an Istanbul hospital for stitches. What happened? I had asked. Oh that , she had said dismissively...

The drive to Gippsland was a whole new experience, as if Pakenham had never existed. The bypass is open at last. Now you don't get thirteen sets of traffic lights, just a view of the town from the south - a sea of red orange roofs and a shopping centre tower rising out of the middle. Once it would have been a church steeple. The tower was painted with a red Coles logo that could have been seen fifty kilometres away if not for the occasional drifts of heavy rain. It rained most of the way and the wind whipped. Clouds hung low and black. The boys dozed in the back seat. Music makes them sleep. A golden oldies station was doing a retrospective of 1972 and it went from a six-minute Argent progressive rock piece with a Hammond organ solo in the middle, to a Rod Stewart hit, to early Eagles, to the late Billy Thorpe, and then Led Zeppelin's signature song. When was that a top 40 hit? I wondered. It wasn't. Stairway to Heaven was an album track never released as a single; but re...

Back in town. It has rained intermittently for two days; yesterday morning heavily enough to stop traffic on Bell Street as I ploughed west and onto the freeway. I circled Essendon Airport and pulled off at the next exit. By the time I pointed the car down the long, sloping, winding driveway to the school, the rain had passed. Schools on the edge of holidays always have that same tired atmosphere. The year's work of pictures, drawings and posters stuck to classroom windows were already yellowing and curling and odd items of left-behind clothing hung on hooks or on the backs of chairs. The students had finished earlier in the week, and the few remaining teaching staff wandered here and there, tying up loose ends and looking forward to lunch. Then they were gone and I spent a lonely day in the staff room working on the book. There's something kind of melancholy about an empty school. At least you don't get interrupted. I locked the place up at four o'clock. It echoed. * ...

Sometimes you forget to look at the scenery. I was driving south on the Nepean Highway out of Mt Eliza and behind Mt Martha towards Safety Beach. The road bears inland for a short way and then dips down and curves around in a wide arc, so that the view opens up like a curtain in a theatre. And you see the water. Endless blue stretched away towards the southern peninsula. In the haze, a ship trudged up the horizon towards the city. Here the road turns back towards the bay along a ridge parallel with Martha Cove. This was the old way into Safety Beach and Dromana, before the freeway came; and houses hung on the cliff on both sides of the road enjoying the unchanging view. Now some of the older houses on the lower side are gone, bulldozed for the new development. A few cling on, like elderly aunts who refuse to go into the nursing home. Two years ago, Martha Cove was just a long scar in the earth of an undeveloped section of the peninsula. Last year it heaved with excavators, and earthmov...

It was hot and humid well into the evening. The sun hadn't broken through the haze all day. Late in the morning I had had to drive to East Kew, commonly referred to as Far Kew, because it stretches almost to North Balwyn; and the roads were choked with traffic, the kind of traffic that doesn't know quite where it's going, like Christmas shoppers torn between Chadstone and the City and ending up at Northcote Plaza. Something should be done about Christmas. Three million people (or is Melbourne four millions now?) swelter in traffic jams on their way to marathon shopping trips at plazas the size of suburbs and emerge hours if not days later laden with iPods and DVD players and home theatre systems and other necessities of life for anyone older than six; and then when the day arrives they sit down at midday in forty degree heat (but that's OK, the air conditioner's on; just don't tell anyone we voted for the Green Party) to a table of roasted turkey, glazed ham, ro...

I have an invitation to a Christmas party, the theme for which is 'Las Vegas'. Why? I've got no idea, but I do know I can't stand parties with themes. They get in the way of the conversation, like loud music. I went to a party once that had a Hollywood theme. You had to go as a movie. Fortuitously, my next-door-neighbour at the time, an actor with Polyglot Theatre, had a full size shark suit in her shed, and I went as Jaws. No-one knew who I was and I didn't get a thing to eat. Yes, I know Las Vegas is a city in the United States and I think of gambling and Wayne Newton and flashy buildings. But do I go dressed as the punter or the floor show? Or one of the buildings?

I should never have started it. I volunteered. Why? Because I didn't want someone else to make a hash of it. And now I am in the middle of it, lost and adrift and wishing to be shipwrecked on the shores of a wild inhospitable island where who-knows-what lives; a fate at least less harrowing than washing about on the waves just waiting to drown. At least there might be coconuts on the island. And fresh water when it rains. And a tree for shelter. And maybe a Girl Friday with wild hair and wild eyes and a gently swaying walk ... I woke up. It was three in the morning; exactly the time - for every writer who ever lived - when the book seems further away and less likely than at any other time of day or night. With a far closer deadline. In fact, the book is impossible at three o'clock in the morning. By seven a.m. the book's chances have improved and the deadline seems to have loosened a little. Must be the sunshine, warm and caring and nurturing and strength-giving. I should c...

The taste of summer is salt and brine and the faint indistinct tang of the sea coming in from a hidden bay, way down off the cliffs, or the gently roaring ocean somewhere beyond, over the other side of the peninsula. It seems like a stretch, but you can taste that in a bowl of pasta on a hot night when the sun has almost gone except for a last tinge of gold in the tops of the trees. Spaghetti with vongole. Cook a scored clove of garlic in a little oil, add a dash of white wine, two cups of diced tomatoes, some torn basil and salt and pepper. When simmering nicely, add 500g of clams. Most clams from the market are grit-free, but if not, first soak in a bucket of water for at least half an hour. They will expel the grit. They must know. Cook for a minute or two until the clams open up. Toss out any unopened ones. Cook 250g of pasta. I use my favourite bavette - or linguine - and when cooked to your liking, drain and combine with the sauce. More torn basil over the top (right now, ours is...

The product ranges at the two major supermarket chains, Safeway and Coles, continue to dwindle in favour of their own house brands of doubtful provenance; in fact of unknown provenance as far as the consumer is concerned. The smaller IGA chain of independents allows its member stores to stock product according to local need, something Safeway and Coles can't or won't do. IGA deserves support. A huge number of small businesses have been cut out of representation on Coles and Safeway shelves across Australia by the two majors, in favour of cheap imports. If that's globalisation, I'm not buying. Give me quality and the hell with China. Example: Margaret Rowland Authentic Indian has been manufacturing genuine high quality curry products for more than forty years; but, as far as I am aware, has never been stocked by Safeway and Coles. Margaret Rowland probably can't manufacture in sufficient quantities for their vast supply chains. All the more reason to support Margare...

Thanks to Will Studd, I can eat a rare steak topped with a slice of roquefort. He was the man forced to bury 80 kilograms of the stuff, an event leading to the reversal of the roquefort importation ban. Mr Studd's new book is entitled Cheese Slices. Review here , courtesy The Age . This would be a perfect Christmas gift. You could read it after Christmas dinner, with the cheese platter and another drink at hand, when everyone else has fallen asleep or gone home. But you would have to like cheese, of course. Mr Studd does. You can tell by the way he talks: " ... I learned that Spanish Valdeon blue, which I always thought was matured in caves and wrapped in sycamore leaves, was actually wrapped in plane tree leaves and matured in fridges." We all have those apocalyptic moments.

There he was, on the front page, photographed coming out of church with his wife on Sunday morning, trying to look humble and not quite succeeding. The man who declared he was an economic conservative at his campaign launch. The man who slammed the Coalition's profligate spending promises. Who was Right and who Left? Before the election, the papers were similarly all over the place. The editorially Right-tending Weekend Australian endorsed and recommended a Labor vote; Left-leaning Fairfax's flagship and only national newspaper, the Australian Financial Review , wanted to stay with the Coalition. The voters bought. Left went Right, and Left won. You could be forgiven for thinking that Right is now to the Left of Left. It isn't of course, but based on the campaign, that's how it looked on major policy fronts. And now Australia has a conservative Christian Prime Minister - a Queenslander - who has promised to cut spending and slash bureaucracy . These attributes and a pa...

A mechanical curtain about the size of a hangar door opened slowly, groaning. On the other side of the curtain, a vast room contained a sea of round tables. There must have been a hundred. On every table sat a burning candle inside a tall white cylinder embossed with a design of black tracery resembling curled wrought iron. The glow of the candle reproduced the tracery, in shadow, across the white linen on each table. It was perfect. Then seven hundred people galloped in and sat down. Wine waiters circled tables backwards with one arm behind their backs and the other pouring from linen-shouldered wine bottles into impossibly large glasses. Try it sometime. It's not easy, especially when people put things on the ground behind their chairs; I don't know, bags, coats, award trophies, walking sticks. Then the food arrived. Battalions of waiters came out from somewhere far away, beyond the black curtain, plates up their arms like shields. They dealt them around the tables without sp...

After a while my eyes adjusted to the darkness. It takes time after standing in blazing sunshine for half an hour. The auditorium was enormous and the interior designers had thrown a lot of black paint around. Everything was black. Black walls, black stage, black seating, black floor. The ceiling was at a vast height and if you craned your neck you could make out the usual affair of blacked-out air conditioning piping and lighting and sound wiring and spotlights. That's a lot of black paint. $12 million dollars worth . The PR writers gush: 'With no expense spared on the $12 million fit out, Peninsula is best described as a sublime warehouse conversion that fuses Shed 14’s rich-heritage (sic) with today’s most contemporary and glamorous design, created by leading interior design firm blackmilk.' That explains the black. The place is described as have been 'inspired by London's iconic Tate Museum', which seems a stretch, unless you reverse the comparison and th...

This time I knew exactly where to go. Last time I was in Docklands, it was late and dark and I hadn't been to that end of town before. This time the building was easier to find and it was broad daylight. The problem was it was 38 degrees and I was wearing a dinner suit and the flies from way up north had invited themselves along . I was a little early and I waited out the front of a building called Peninsula at Pier 14. I was meeting a colleague who had my ticket. Pier 14 is an old warehouse at the bottom of the now-extended La Trobe Street, where that street arches up over the railway yards and dumps the trams and the traffic at the water's edge. Pier 14 sits facing square north, alongside the old Swanston Dock which ten years ago was a festering heap of rats and broken timber beams with no boats tied up, and is now Victoria Harbour with million dollar cruise boats and water that sparkles with money. It's amazing how the view changes when you call a dock a harbour. I had ...

Ten years ago, we lived at No. 5 in this street. The previous owner of No. 5, Mr Treadwell, had been something of a gardener and had flowers leaping out of the ground all year round, just to keep him entertained, I suppose. No YouTube or plasma screens in those days. So we moved in and the flowers entertained us. Poppies shot up in November, unfurled their pink heads to the sun and then gently faded away, leaving stalks and flowerheads carrying seeds. I kept the seeds from year to year. Then we moved to the country. The seeds came along and the poppies grew in the country. Later, we moved back to the city, a few suburbs away from this one. The poppies grew. Then we returned to this street in October 2005, buying the house at No. 1, two doors away from our old house. Today the poppies are flowering fifteen metres from where Mr Treadwell tended them for how long? He had been in that house since 1938.

Late afternoon Sunday. Hot. At Blairgowrie beach, the tide was out. Children played on the sand, paddled in the shallows, splashed and shrieked. A southerly breeze meant it wasn't any hotter than it could have been. The sky had been clear all day, but earlier in the afternoon I had noticed a grey smear to the south, over Bass Strait. Over a couple of hours the smear came closer and pixillated. Then it came down from the sand dunes and drifted across the north-facing beach in shards of something white and wet and tingling. The cloud cover was on the ground. I have never seen anything like it, at least not in these conditions. It was like being hosed with the sprayer set to a fine mist. It was like standing in rain that hadn't rained yet. In fact, it was exactly that. Half an hour later, we left the bay beach and turned the car south, crossed two kilometres of peninsula and drove into the carpark at the ocean side to get a better view. Here, the unbroken cloud mass was rolling in...

Otherwise known as provencale sauce. Enjoyed by vegetarians and carnivores alike, this sauce is robust and spicy and is ideal with long or short pasta. I often pair it with gnocchi. It improves overnight as the rich flavours intermingle. Set a heavy pan on the slowest of flames. Throw in a couple of dozen halved walnuts, the same number of halved and pitted black olives, a chopped onion, a chopped red pepper, a dozen quartered button mushrooms, half a cup of peas, a chopped red or green chili pepper and a scored clove of garlic. The idea is to give the walnuts a head start on a slight toastiness and then let everything start to sweat before adding fluid. Now add either a jar of passata or a couple of 425g cans of diced tomatoes, a tablespoonful of pesto and a cup of water. I always rinse the water through the tomato jar or cans to use up every last bit. Now give it a good turn with a wooden spoon, bring it to a simmer and leave the sauce bubbling slowly for half an hour. Chill and refr...

Early afternoon. Warm. No wind. A perfect day, one of the ones you dream about. I walked east along Woolley Street on the way to my sister's house. Nothing stirred. They say the Melbourne Cup is the race that that stops a nation, but you don't really believe it until you walk down a street anywhere in the country an hour before the race. Anyone who is going anywhere has already arrived and anyone else is staying right where they are. Except me. I walked on. Across the road, a gate clicked and in the silence it sounded too loud, like in a movie. Further along, from a darkened open front door, the muffled wheeze and strike of a clock. Two o'clock. I reached Mt Alexander Road and crossed the first half of the road to the median strip where the tram line runs between stands of old palm trees. A tram came out of the palm trees rocking gently from side to side and slid down the hill, under the railway bridge and out of sight. It was empty except for the driver. He would have had ...

1963. Early childhood memories are stills, later ones are moving images. This is a still: my father's workshop, dim and dark; wood shavings everywhere; a timber project in progress on the sawbench; His Master's Voice radio, fake red leather encased, sits on a shelf, covered in wood dust. Bert Bryant calls the race on 3UZ and Gatum Gatum wins. I liked the name. It sounded like galloping hooves. 1965. Family picnic in the backyard. Father runs a sweep and everyone gets a horse. Mother's wins: Light Fingers, ridden by Roy Higgins. 1968. My father's on-and-off freelance photography career sees us on the rail at Flemington. We stare at the bizarre sight of a single horse rounding the turn and entering the straight. It is Rain Lover, winning the Cup by the greatest margin ever. 1973. I am back in the workshop at home, going through an early oil painting phase. I am trying to paint a mountain and wondering what colour they are as Gala Supreme crosses the line. The mountain end...

You could have put the house on it after all, and doubled your money at least; although in this current property market bubble, you would achieve much the same result just by waiting until next week. Meanwhile, the headline writers are in top form if you like bad puns.

It's the time of year. Last weekend we had a picnic way down there in the valley by the Tarago River in deepest Gippsland where the black and white cows live; and the flies came along, just to be sociable. It was Sunday afternoon and we barbecued my mother-in-law's Lorne sausage, which is a highly spiced combination of minced beef and pork and you eat it on fresh buttered bread with Lea and Perrins sauce and sip a scotch and imagine you're back in the Highlands; except the temperature is thirty degrees celsius. Well, it was last Sunday, in Gippsland, before that gale came over and whipped the treetops so that they looked like streamers at a Grand Final. After the gale, the temperature dropped and the flies went away. Later in the week, another fly came along. I could see it. It wasn't buzzing and flicking like the Gippsland flies, but it was kind of swimming backwards and forwards in front of me, as if in jelly. The funny thing about the fly was, I could only see it wi...

Football's over for the year and we're well into the spring racing carnival. The Melbourne Cup runs next Tuesday - 3200 metres, one and a half laps of Flemington, clockwise - and once that's over, you're staring down the barrel of Christmas. Isn't that a nice prospect? Of course, Christmas junk has been in the supermarkets for weeks, probably since Easter. Today, walking through IGA, I saw a rack of Simpsons Advent calendars. Moving suddenly onto the recipe, because there is no possible segue, unless you can think of one. Prosciutto-wrapped chicken breasts with cheese and pesto. Slice two chicken breasts in half, but not all the way through. Stuff them with a generous amount of pesto and a slice of cheese. I used a nice creamy havarti. Now wrap the breasts in slices of prosciutto. If this is very thinly sliced, its texture will ensure it stretches and holds well when wrapped carefully. Otherwise use toothpicks. Now cook the wrapped breasts very gently in a little o...

Yes, that ti-tree and moonah is nice, but it throws a lot of rubbish, especially as it matures and ages. The beach house is not on an overly large block but I've spent days cleaning up. Several older trunks were rotten and had to come out; the younger ones have thrown down enough junk to pose a hazard come high summer. The foliage and finer twigs dry out, drop off and make a carpet of flammable material; while wind regularly blows down larger branches. Summers around the world this past year seem to have produced a greater number of particularly disastrous fires, or is it just that I'm more aware of them? Anyway, I'm taking no chances. Rake, rake, rake. Then there's painting to be done. Sea air is hell on woodwork.

Five days out, the forecast was 21 degrees and fine. Two days out, 24 and fine, with late rain. A day prior and we were looking at 31. On the morning of the garden party for Thomas's first birthday, the Bureau had revised yet again: 34 degrees and windy, with late rain. 34 is getting uncomfortable, but 'windy' can mean anything from ruffled tablecloths to detached roof shingles. We proceeded, with one eye on the sky and the other on small children climbing under the table. The wind stayed reasonably civilised and cloud cover kept the temperature down to about 32. It was very humid. The air smelled of rain and about one drop hit my head around three. I doubt it would have made it to the ground in any case. The last guests departed around six. It was still 27 degrees at midnight. A cool breeze blew through the house early next morning. Thomas enjoyed his first birthday, thank you very much.

If pigeons annoy you when you're trying to enjoy an uninterrupted five minute conversation with a cup of coffee at Brunetti's in the city square, help is on its way. The help takes the form of a 350k/mh air-to-air missile that takes out the pigeons out mid-flight. They will never know what hit them. The falcons were wiped out, as I mentioned in November 2004, by some idiot poisoning the pigeons, obviously unaware that the poison would move along the food chain and subsequently kill their predators, the falcons. Now, peregrines have returned to city pigeon duty: 'The fastest animal on earth, a peregrine falcon dives on its prey at up to 350km/h. The sheer force of the bird's striking talons stuns the doomed victim, which is then whisked back home to a simple box, filled with sand, fixed to the window ledge. ... The new chicks, two males and a female, are believed to be 17 days old. Their grey-white fluffy down will be shed in about a fortnight as they prepare to take w...

When I mentioned her in my first post at this weblog on Sunday 9 November 2003, she was six, almost seven. She will turn eleven next month. Canisha and her younger sisters visited last week. She read books to William. It seems not so long that she was as young as he, and we read books to her. She is William's niece; William's much-older-brother's eldest daughter. During the afternoon, we cooked and ate blueberry pancakes. Blueberry pancakes. I do pancakes by consistency. I never measure the ingredients, but mete out milk to the point at which the batter runs like honey on a hot day. Is that exact enough? Of course not. What honey? How hot the day? Never mind. Pancakes are rarely tripped up by the recipe; more often by the pan. They can stick. I try to pour the batter into the half-tablespoonful of oil I add to the pan, so that it pushes the oil outwards like a concentric wave and creates a barrier. This usually works but sometimes doesn't. I once bought a non-stick pan...

I picked up a steamed new season's spear, plunged it into the pesto, sour cream and yogurt mixture, then raised it to my mouth. It snapped sweetly, making a faint 'snick'. Some food even sounds delicious. Asparagus is in season. Steaming aparagus and dipping it into your favourite sauce, dip, dressing or whatever is probably the ultimate way to enjoy it; even if it is sometimes a little indelicate. For a late Sunday breakfast in summer, I sometimes steam asparagus and dress it with a light vinaigrette and serve it on oval plates alongside two or three very lightly poached eggs and barely toasted, buttered sourdough bread. You dip the asparagus spears into the egg and afterwards you mop up the egg remains with the barely toasted sourdough bread while idly searching the Sunday papers for something worth reading. Dip, dip, dip. Flick, flick, flick. This year, to start the asparagus season, I made my favourite salad, a kind of hybrid nicoise salad. First, I hauled out my large,...

The almost-ill-fated move was October 2005 and it seems like just weeks ago. (Reminder: never move with Max.) Now, two years down the road, let's take a look around the back garden. East fence: was totally bare; now all covered in jasmine, two types to make it a little more interesting, and now all in bloom. Throw up a window in the house, and in comes the scent. South fence: was totally bare, syzygium australe now seven feet tall with a bullet. Look! It has edible berries! West fence: was totally bare, viburnum hedge now four feet tall and growing. Lawn central: ornamental pear, ten feet tall. Will provide good summer shade in years to come. Now let's take a walk down the path, through the side gate and into the front yard, which slopes north directly into the sun. Along the eastern boundary, the weigela I planted as a one-foot shrub is growing strongly and will create a hedge with the older ones already there. They bear masses of deep pink, smallish flowers. The Queen Eliza...

Back in August, Dr. Alice linked (scroll down) to this list of 101 summer recipe ideas published by the New York Times. I found it brilliant in its simplicity. Every recipe is appealing and is described concisely in a line or two. Some of my all-time favourites are listed in some form or another; such as 5, 34 and 96. Print it out, stick in on your fridge and cross them off as you cook your way through a long hot summer. Thanks to Dr. Alice.

The lake. Blossoming cherry and tree ferns obscure towering mountain ash and eucalypt.

The lawn overlooking the lake. Yes, he had to run down it about twenty times. Only tumbled over once.

The hills are in the East and they are soft blue at this time of year and if you go up into them on a quiet weekday you will be a world away from the suburbs they rise up from. I took a right turn off the highway and away from the furniture barns and the traffic snarls and the giant intersections that would take five minutes to cross on foot, and pointed the car into the relative quiet of the lower slopes. Then we climbed. The first thing you notice up here is the size of the plants. Everything grows larger due to the crisp air, the cooler temperatures and the rain. I rounded a sweeping curve and an immense photinia hedge came into view, glistening in the sun and hiding an old house except for the top of its faded tiled roof and a red-brick chimney with twin terracotta pots. Viburnum with dense clumps of white flowers gave way to rows of camellias and an occasional jacaranda. Eucalypts made a grey-green background and, around another curve, a massive late-flowering rhododendron canopy ...

And so, after seven years, the Premiership flag or cup or whatever it is they hoist in the air at the end of the Grand Final comes home to Victoria, if not quite to Melbourne; which means my team, Essendon, remains the last Melbourne club to triumph on that One Day in September. But today, the people of Geelong are the happiest in Australia , especially if they own a bottle shop. I have some sentimental attachment to Geelong. My sister lived there in the mid-seventies; I visited her frequently in the winter of 1976, driving my first car, a Falcon XP base model with the 144 c.i. engine, no heater or demister and a radio that kept playing Fernando. I hated ABBA. Later, Geelong was my regular halfway stop on journeys to and from my family's house at Birregurra. Today's weather seems as cold as those faraway drives down Geelong Road. Last week's taste of Spring has been snatched away from us like a toy from a toddler and replaced with a cold blast blanketing the city in rain d...

I was at my second office reading a forty page powerpoint printout about some marketing genius's idea of what 'sets a company apart'. It was full of words like 'innovate' and 'respond' and 'focus on the customer' but it was devoid of any common sense at all. My second office is the front bar return, tucked in next to the wall, near the orange juicer, at Brunetti's. The bar is of solid marble and it is wide and there is space enough between the padded stools to unfold a broadsheet and not take anyone's eye out or knock their coffee over. I was up from the beach house for a meeting in town and I had to read some background notes before going to the early-afternoon meeting in some airless skyscraper in St Kilda Road. Since when did background notes comprise forty pages of powerpoint jargon? Probably since companies have had marketing departments full of people on $250,000 a year. Coffee first. The coffee was good. Then lunch. Something light. So...

Sydney Road to High Street is a long walk with a stroller, but it was a good day for a long walk. The early Spring sunshine was warm without biting and a nice fresh breeze was making little shirred ripples on the wider parts of Merri Creek as we went south along the bicycle path. We picked it up at the Harding Street suspension bridge and followed it all the way to Arthurton Road, stopping at the Ceres outdoor cafe for coffee. The coffee was okay but their food prices are a little on the high side. The cafe was doing great business with a slew of tired-looking parents whose kids were tearing around in the toy-filled sandpit. William joined them. Then along Arthurton Road past St Georges Road towards High Street. Music could be heard in the distance, waves of sound in turn growing louder and then fading, as distant music does on a blustery day. A little closer and you could smell the barbecue. * The annual High Street festival is more about music than food, but you wouldn't have go...

Slowly, the shed door creaks open, and from the darkness within emerges a black metal monster set on four industrial-strength castor wheels. Four feet high and six feet long, it is dusty and it creaks. It looks like an antediluvian mechanical monster that has been in a dark cave for too long. It's my barbecue. It's out for summer. I'll dust the lid and grease the grill and oil the wheels and scrape out the ashes I left in it after the last cook-out seven months ago, and then I'll just look at it and admire it and wonder what I'll cook on it this summer. In terms of detail, it's a basic affair with no bells or whistles; just a large grill in the middle over a coal binnacle of just the right depth, trays at either end and a storage bin below. But it barbecues better than anything else I've ever used. The whole thing is made of cast iron. It is heavy. You wouldn't want to get it on a hill and take the castor-wheel brakes off. * Incidentally, I procured this...

Melbourne weather is changeable at the best of times but in Spring it goes nuts. I spent a pretty blue-skied weekend clearing all the rubbish that the Ti-tree and Moonah insist on throwing down. They might be pretty but they make one hell of a mess. The mess was burning nicely - better now than in a summer bushfire - by late afternoon Sunday, when the sky turned that ominous shade of purple-tinged grey that says 'storm approaching'. Within five minutes a westerly gale-force wind whipped across from Point Nepean, sucking behind it several cloud-loads of rain which seemed to move horizontally. The rain failed to put out the fire and next morning there was a fresh load of wind-scattered tree rubbish to be picked up. Today is a diamond. Still and warm. The bay is twinkling again and there is a slight haze on the bay, blurring the horizon. What's for lunch? Potato and bacon frittata. Fry two finely sliced onions and two chopped rashers of bacon in a little oil. Beat five eggs wi...

Thomas was born with a shoulder that appeared to the doctors upon examination to have suffered some very slight damage at birth. To them, he appeared to be favouring it, although the layman would have noticed nothing amiss. A few sessions of gentle physiotherapy had it functioning to their satisfaction. Then, when Thomas started crawling a month or so ago, it was on one hand and one elbow, bumping along like a car with a flat tyre. However, without the need for any further physio, he gained strength naturally and now is the fastest baby on all fours. He chases William around the house. Yes, they make noise. * The kitchen has never been busier. William eats practically everything; while Thomas is, of course, on solids. Having recently superseded the fully-pureed stage, he is currently eating semi-pureed with a number of discrete pieces and is starting to accept small items by hand, such as a tiny square of bread. Neither William nor Thomas ate commercial baby food, not that we object to...

Caesar salad never goes away. I'm sure that some chefs wish it would; like seafood cocktail and chateaubriand, but it will probably stay right on the menu as long as people like me keep ordering it. I have eaten Caesar salads all over town, most often at the kinds of lunch places that aren't quite as good as high class restaurants and aren't quite as bad as greasy diners. You see them up and down St Kilda Road. People in suits tear in, bolt their lunch and tear out again. Except on Fridays when everyone is a little more relaxed. I order Caesar salad almost by default. It's the acid test of a good lunchtime eatery. Most Caesar salads around town are pretty ordinary; occasionally they are excellent and every now and then you strike one that is truly appalling, such as the one I ordered in a cafe in Bourke Place, the busy food court down the legal end of town. Whatever green remained in the rust-edged lettuce leaves failed to show through the grey oozing mass that wasn...

Stuffed red peppers : Boil two cups of rice. Toast half a cup of pine nuts. Cook half an onion and a clove of garlic in a little oil, add minced meat. (I used pork and veal, conveniently ground together by S&R Butchers in Sydney Road.) Then fresh herbs from the garden - mint, parsley and a little sage. Combine cooked mince, moist boiled rice and toasted pine nuts. I like about three parts rice to one part meat. Throw in some spices - I used sumac, about a tablespoonful, and salt and pepper. Cut the tops off the peppers, clean out the seeds and the membrane and stuff them with the rice mixture. Place their lids back on and stand them to attention in a baking dish. Surround the peppers with a can of chopped tomatoes, add half a cup of white wine and the same amount of water, depending on various dimensions, including peppers and dish. Bake about an hour. OK, so mine went a little black on top, but then I'm not a food stylist, I'm just a ninth-tier blogger; and that back...

They still exist.

The view looking East from the front porch, 8pm. "Coastal Moonah Woodland is dominated structurally by Moonah Melaleuca lanceolata subsp. lanceolata. The Moonah trees, which are often twisted into fascinating shapes, range in height from five to ten metres. Canopy cover of the community usually dictates classification by Specht and Specht (1999) as a low open-forest. However, Gillison ... refers to woodland as a ‘structural plant formation usually with a graminoid component, dominated by perennial woody plants over two metres tall which do not have their crowns touching’. As Gillison (1994) points out, this broad definition overlaps the open-woodland, woodland and open-forest definitions of Specht and Specht (1999)." Thank you. That white thing is the moon.

The morning of the first day of Spring called for a visit to the Mornington Peninsula market. It is an everything market: produce, second-hand items, food, plants, craft, bric-a-brac. It doesn't pretend to call itself a farmers' market, but regular stalls are held by small-holding local farmers. We came home with a bag of Peninsula apples, three varieties, and some fresh vegetables; several potted African daisies, the ones that not only survive drought but spread; and a second-hand rotary lawn edger for $10, the kind that you push and gives you a cleaner edge than motor-driven ones. * These early Spring afternoons are made for work and I spent three hours in the garden of the beach house wielding a hoe in bright sunshine. The weeds gave way easily. There had been rain, the garden bed is elevated and the soil is slightly sandy. You could have filled the compost bin four times. I made a mound in the far corner. The weeds can break down in the open. What to put in the ground? It w...

I've been tired and busy and jaded at the end of a long cold winter and it's been a week since my last post. But never mind because here we sit, perched precariously on the edge of Spring, teetering gently and expecting to drop headlong into a half-remembered world of blazing sunshine in blue skies and endless fields of daisies in which new lambs gambol and skip. But not yet. Not before we take our leave from Winter with one last hearty meal: our old favourite, the oxtail stew. (Why 'oxtail'? Why not 'beeftail'? Apparently the name goes back to the days when oxen were bred for transport first and eating second; rather than for eating only. Oxen subsequently became cattle, the English language’s only mass noun, with the females known as heifers prior to calving and thenceforth as cows; and the males as bullocks and then bulls, unless they become steers in which case ... . Ah, forget it. This is about food, not language, although I must say it is interesting to no...

Continuing an infrequent series on restaurants I have known. 1984: Num Fong in Swanston Street. Red velvet curtaining the walls, Lazy Susans on round tables, a host called Henry and a menu that never changed. The occasion: family lunches and dinners. We lived about a kilometre away at the time. My older children were under ten then. They loved the sesame toasts, the chicken and sweet corn soup and the banana fritters. Num Fong only just closed earlier this year, swamped by a new wave of Asian eateries on Swanston Street that were faster, fresher, cheaper. Farewell, Henry. 1985: Baker's opens next to Mario's in Brunswick Street. The occasion: most days. This was my ‘office’ for some time. I wrote a small children’s book there, on paper napkins. (Baker's moved further down Brunswick Street in about 1989.) 1986: Acland Street's Fairy Stork . The occasion: our regular Sunday night dinner spot. Lobster tails in garlic sauce, whole steamed fish, rice, Wyndham Estate chard...