What I Cooked Last Night

(UPDATED 1/1/09; more pictures added) January Australian Open: tennis on the lawn. February Forty celsius: herbs and succulents baking in late afternoon heat. March Mystery dish: Lasagne? Moussaka? Sweet potato layered with cheese sauce? Can’t remember. But the green thing in the middle is a basil leaf. April Instant circus: elephants dance on cans of peppers and beans. Crescent moon: brittle sky on a cold late autumn evening, as seen from Merri Creek trail (moon right of centre, barely visible - click to enlarge). May Apprentice chef: Thomas with saucepans. Downpour: Lygon Street in flood. June Birthday: William turns three. Winter fun: Thomas reinvents library steps; clears shelves in search of favourite book. Mr Horse unimpressed. July Winter sun: lunch at Blairgowrie café: Tracy's hand and coffee obscured by giant cake serving. August Surf's up: early afternoon on a freezing Portsea ocean beach. September Snack time: two boys in a chair; Mr Owl looks on. Storm: waves batte...

It was early afternoon on a hot Christmas Day. Inside a million houses across the country you’d be deafened by the roar of ripping paper, popping corks, slamming oven doors and everyone talking at once. But outside in the heat, it was so quiet you could hear a dry gum leaf scratching along the street in the breeze. I got the car out and we drove east on an empty freeway to where the suburbs are green and leafy. Twenty minutes later I took an exit ramp, crossed over the freeway, turned right into a side street and a kilometre later, turned right again back over the freeway along a narrow bridge road that ended at a steel gate. The gate slid open. We drove through. Someone – one of Tracy’s cousins - had had the brainwave of organising Christmas lunch on a golf course. Christmas lunch on a golf course makes sitting at an over-sized dining table for three hours in a too-small inner-city terrace house dining room with twenty other people on a hot day feel like a prison sentence, especially ...

... corporations fail, globes warm, economies cool, rates crash and economists argue but we're all agreed that afternoon must tea go on. Another cup, thank you. And pass me a piece of chocolate cake. Happy Christmas.

The rain is still around and the days have been cooler and Christmas is coming. I cooked this osso buco recipe a few nights ago and it was good. It seemed a shame to throw out the fragrant sauce that was left over. So I didn't. I made a sauce for pasta - a ragu. I chopped the remaining cooked meat, returned it to the left over sauce and added a can of diced tomatoes, half a can of chick peas, a cup of white wine and a sprinkling of chopped parsley. For this meat sauce I cooked a pot of rigatoni, a grooved pasta robust enough to carry the fragrant ragu. The whole thing was capped off with a heap of shaved parmesan and more chopped parsley. It must have been good. Even the children ate it. Except for the chick peas.

Apparently it was the most rain in one day since early 2006. Most of it ended up in the bay of course, but the downpour coincided with a new government campaign to encourage people to use less water. The campaign material shows two pictures of a dam, some years ago and now, with the recent picture showing a lower level of water. A cynical counter-campaign would show two identical photos of a empty valley entitled The Dam the Government Failed to Build . The irony is that the north-south pipeline currently being built to divert water from the Goulburn to backyard water features in Melbourne is now cutting a swathe through more wilderness than would have any dam . * Early afternoon Sunday, the clouds drifted away to the north. Sunday is a day of rest but rest is what you want it to be. For me it means avoiding shopping malls full of frantic shoppers and taking a long walk along Merri Creek. Off I went, pushing the wakeful child (Thomas) in the three-wheel pram while the sleepy child (Wil...

It was a warm Tuesday morning. I caught the train into town, got off at Parliament station, walked down a wind-swept Lonsdale Street, climbed a hundred steps up to the entrance of a vast grey office block and entered through sliding glass doors big enough for an aircraft hangar. No wonder. You could have parked a jumbo in the lobby. I crossed the marble floor to the lifts. One whispered open and took me to what felt like the eightieth floor. I was the only person in it. The digital clock on the electronic floor indicator read 9:15 and I wondered what time the other million people in the building must have started work. I sat in a glassed-in reception area for about ten minutes reading one of those free newspaper magazines full of ads for diamond-encrusted watches and articles about how to cope during a recession. Then a woman burst through the door, smiled and grabbed my hand, shook it furiously and then led me down a passage-way and around three corners to an office cubicle the size o...

A new book came across my desk: The Man Who Ate the World . Now, where have I heard a title like that? Rummage, rummage. Ah, here it is. In the row of books behind another row of books in the long, low timber cabinet in the lounge room. I really should get rid of some books. In fact, I really should get rid of some cabinets the books are in. Problem is, you can't throw out the books you've read because you like them and therefore you will always keep them; but paradoxically you cannot throw out the ones you haven't read, because you might like them when you do read them. It's a problem I don't know how to solve without the introduction of a 28-hour day. I pulled out the book: The Man Who Ate Everything , published in 1998. Tracy gave it to me one Christmas. But it's by a different author - Jeffrey Steingarten - so the title similarity had not indicated, as I had thought, a sequel, a prequel, one of a series or book two of a trilogy. And yet there were other lik...

This is easy, fast and surprisingly good. Take a can of chickpeas, a 500g pack of spaghetti, two cloves of garlic and a thick slice of prosciutto, diced. Cook the spaghetti. Puree two-thirds of the chickpeas with the garlic cloves, a tablespoon of olive oil and a little salt. Sizzle the prosciutto in oil in a pan and when almost brown, add the reserved chickpeas. Drain the cooked spaghetti reserving a little fluid, place the spaghetti in the pan with the prosciutto and chickpeas and combine. Add a small amount of the pasta cooking water if necessary. Transfer to serving bowls and top with pureed chickpeas and plenty of chopped parsley if you still have acres of it in your garden as I do.

7:30 p.m. Chimney and terra cotta tile roofs from the 1940s; poplars of a similar age; storm clouds gilded by setting sun. 8 p.m. Clouds drift beyond the sharp lines of post-art deco apartments that were once small-scale factories. 8:30 p.m. Evening turns monochrome; 1919 Lincoln mills chimney in distance, a lonely sentinel of a long-gone manufacturing era.

I was reading an old cooking magazine from about 1999 when I came across a recipe featuring a ' cappucino ' of something, demonstrating that some fads last longer than others. Except now they call it a froth or foam, and although these substances of tiny bubbles oozing across your food undoubtedly provide a memorable dining experience, they merely remind me - as they will anyone who has ever owned dogs - of the latters' more emetic moments. Which, changing the subject very quickly, makes me wonder how long you maintain a trend before it becomes simply boring or mindlessly imitative, if not outright plagiaristic. After all, plagiarism in writing is a hanging offence, even in places that no longer allow capital punishment. There's always an exception. Remind me never to copy someone else's writing. Anyway. The death of fads: one day soon a chef will place a piece of meat next to the mash instead of on top of it and the sauce on the meat instead of squirting it around ...

We drove to the beach house to take advantage of this string of hot days. It's still quiet here mid-week, but the busy season is coming. An old corner cafe (it used to be Anime Del Mar ) at the Rye end of Point Nepean Road that has lain empty for some time has reopened as a ' Real Estate Agent and Cafe ' under the old Briggs Shaw banner. Excuse me for laughing. Just imagine: the unique skillsets of verbose menu creators merging with those of real estate agents to create a newly enticing style of property prose: Solid red brick cottage on a bed of concrete topped with sundried terra cotta tiles and a side of julienned palings and finished with an aromatic herb garden. Then the price: 1650000 , devoid of dollar sign or decimal point so that it looks cheaper. On the other hand, perhaps you'd just get a brash waiter with a clipboard and a red tie refusing to take no for an answer to his question of whether you want garlic bread - before you'd even sat down and gotten c...

More supermarket nonsense. I was walking down the canned fish and vegetables aisle when I noticed a huge sign which read 'New & Improved!' ; the exclamation mark no doubt being thought to add enormous power to the selling proposition in the mind of the writer. Can you imagine the damage to an already trashed economy if there were no exclamation marks? I digress, but only until the aisle-end display of pallet-loads of branded cola, Australia's largest-selling supermarket item in dollar terms. Maybe the economy's not so bad if people are happy to pay money to rot their teeth and other body parts. Maybe I digressed a little further. Then I stopped dead. 'New' and 'improved'? * This was no ground-breaker, no earth-shatterer, nothing really special at all, just a pot of napoli sauce. But I never seem to get it quite right. Then again, neither do those cheap Italian places that specialise in pizza but do basic sauces for pasta that are so salty they make ...

This election was so little reported here in Australia, that in a straw poll of twenty people I conducted in the last seven days: 1) 15 did not know New Zealand was going to the polls Saturday. 2) 16 did not know the name of the opposition leader/Prime Ministerial candidate. 3) Not a single one knew the name of the opposition deputy leader/Deputy Prime Ministerial candidate. The election result story was printed on page 36 of this country's largest selling newspaper this morning. Make nothing of it. It's just an observation about our nearest neighbour, ANZAC alliance partner, close trading associate nation and the only other prosperous western democracy in this corner of the world. Since most of Australia's twenty millions live on the south-east coast, the two nations with a shared heritage practically stare at each other over the Tasman Sea. No wait, it's an observation about Australian media, not New Zealand. Footnote: the headline writers have already exhausted the...

The first Melbourne Cup I remember was 1965. It must have been a warm day. My father held a family Cup sweep and we listened to the race in the back garden on his portable HMV. My mother sat under the peach tree and held her winning sweep ticket as 3UZ’s Bert Bryant called Light Fingers across the line. My younger brother was beside her in the old wicker pram draped over with an old crocheted insect net. He was three months old. Bart Cummings trained the winner that day, his first Melbourne Cup win; although he had first trained a starter in 1958. Yesterday he won his twelfth Cup with Viewed on the golden anniversary of his first try. Like the numbers? Here's an even more impressive one: Viewed’s owner, Dato Tan Chin Nam first raced a horse in 1948 and has four Melbourne Cups to his credit. The two octogenarians make a great partnership. Cummings on Chin Nam : "He is a benevolent owner. He never complains and knows what we do is best for the horses," Cummings said. Every...

A little to the left of the climbing rose, and closer to the house, down the garden a little way, were beans. Broad beans. They took their time this year, grew slowly. No giant at the top and no Jack at the bottom. No reason to hurry. Now they are out and it is November and we have a hill of beans and the summer herbs are in. November 1. Three cloves of garlic - scored, i.e., finely cross-cut but not right through - in olive oil - Australian, remember? - in a pan. Just until they are warm. Do not burn or even brown. Now throw in two handfuls of beans, just as they are. I didn't peel the skin, they were not big or tough enough. Sweat gently. Add plenty of pepper and not as much salt. Now a half-glass of white wine: simmer gently until done. We are drinking sauvignon blanc now. Given up on chardonnay. The makers have lost the plot. They are either over-oaking it, putting in too much alcohol or trying to make it taste like sauvignon blanc, which it isn't. I miss Len Evans' Cow...

Matt Moran in today's Australian Financial Review Life & Style section (subscription required) writes about the joys of tripe. Yes, joys. Yes, tripe. I grew up with the stuff, done in the traditional English way, with white sauce and parsley. And yes, I liked it. Along with tongue pressed in a bowl, sliced thickly and made into sandwiches with old-fashioned double-black-topped unsliced bread; lamb's fry and bacon; crumbed lamb's brains (especially delicious deep-fried) and roasted lamb flap from which you could peel strips of delicious melting-quality pink meat. Don't grimace, Generation X. Or Y. Or iPod. Or Facebook. Or whatever you're calling yourselves this week. After all, it is your generation that keeps coming up with buzzwords like nose-to-tail eating. But I still don't see too many packages of sweetbreads or calves' heart or lamb kidneys being casually tossed into inner-urban supermarket trolleys along with the Nudie juice or the Simon Johnson ...

Last week The Age previewed Cup food fashions, pointing out that having your finger food done by a proper chef can enhance the experience of placing what's left of your money on horses instead of in banks: At its best, this synthesis between chef and caterer leads to a dish such as Jake Nicholson's pastry cornets with parmesan custard and Tasmanian black truffle, created this year for The Big Group at Lexus and such a perfect - and unexpectedly light - example of modern finger food it might best be described as digitally enhanced. If you can decipher any meaning out of that paragraph at all, it may be that if you whack some truffle into a pastry cylinder, you're a chef and not a caterer. I'm not sure who would be more offended by that, chefs or caterers. No matter. But if you're at the Cup and you notice a bead of sweat on your Lexus salesman's brow while he's scoffing his truffle custard cornet, it might not be race five he's got on his mind but the do...

Once, a long time ago, I had another blog on which I wrote about running and walking dogs. Then I didn't run so much and we didn't have dogs any more, so the blog stopped as well. But sometimes I still run, or at least walk very fast. I ran on Saturday afternoon. It was an unpleasantly hot day with a biting, blustery northwesterly wind. It was the kind of weather that dries you out like a Mildura raisin on a drying rack if you happen to be out in it for a longer time than you intend. I ran a few kilometres and the wind scorched my throat. Maybe I didn't drink enough. Later in the afternoon I was out in the heat some more, walked the few kilometres to and from Sydney Road. Why drive? * It stayed hot all night. I went to bed. I dreamed I was thirsty. These dreams are supposed to be about crawling through the desert on your hands and knees looking for an oasis, but I was in a Coles supermarket and the water and soft drink shelves were closed off and someone was pushing me out ...

I planted it two years ago on a north-facing timber paling fence in the back garden. It failed to grow in its first season. I cut it back, almost to the ground, at the end of that summer. It survived, producing one single bloom last summer. Something happened over winter and spring. My Climbing Gold Bunny took off like a rocket. It marched imperiously over the palings and now its hundreds of yellow blooms are a silent explosion of pale gold in the sun. The vines are approaching the old shed like hungry triffids with an appetite for timber and cement sheeting.

It has been one of the world's biggest health fads for years - if a fad can last that long - and now it is one of the world's biggest scams. The words 'organic' and 'extra virgin' may mean absolutely nothing on your bottle of olive oil. Even the word 'olive' is suspect. News Ltd's dozy Weekly Times carried this story last week (it is not news worldwide), following the ABC's 7:30 Report 's investigation a week earlier: HEATHER EWART: Are consumers being conned? LEANDRO RAVETTI, TECHNICAL DIRECTOR, MODERN OLIVES: Big time. Big time. DR ROD MAILER, AUSTRALIAN OILS RESEARCH LAB: There are products on supermarket shelves we know of that shouldn't be there. Well, straight over to the consumer watchdog then: GRAEME SAMUEL, CHAIRMAN, ACCC: The law is very clear, thou shall not mislead or deceive, we will be honest. Thanks, Graeme. Sit down. HEATHER EWART: The local olive oil industry has long suspected foul play by some international olive oil...

It's hard to eat indoors when it's still light outside at 7.30 in the evening. Had the evening been a few degrees warmer, the following dish would have gone onto the barbecue for our first outdoor meal of the season. But it was cool, so I baked it in the oven and we ate inside. My local fish supplier used to be Lido Seafoods but has changed hands and is now known simply as Sydney Road Fresh Fish. It stocks a far wider range of quality fish than most fish shops and prices are no more than at the over-hyped, overcrowded Victoria Market. I chose a whole rainbow trout - already cleaned and oven-ready - from a tempting array of choices which included baby sardines that need only a dusting with flour and fast frying in oil. Next time. Rainbow trout roasted with leeks, red onion and lemon. 1. Chop a leek radially into thin rings. Rinse grit if necessary. Chop a large red onion into rings. Sweat the leek and onion in oil in a covered pan until they just start to soften. 2. In a bowl, c...

It was the year 2000. The Millennium Bug had failed to bring the world crashing down. The dot.com bust came and went and everything was still fine, give or take a few billion dollars. House prices were like bread dough. They doubled in size every time you looked. Majority thinking was that financial disasters were just a media construct. Or a movie. Or a history book. Around that time, a relative of mine had a friend with a five-digit credit card debt. Interest payments meant the debt wasn't budging. I advised the relative that as a worst-case scenario, the friend's credit card debt could be folded into their mortgage at the then-rate of 4.99%, providing temporary breathing space and allowing the borrower to catch up before accelerating payments back into the mortgage to re-establish the previous equity ratio. The relative advised the friend along those lines. Kind of. The friend went to the bank and came back with no credit card debt, a smiling face, and a brand new car. I hit...

We conclude National Vegetarian Week with five fast (except for the last one) knockout recipes from the Kitchen Hand Official Test Kitchens. Spiced broad beans with pine nuts. Saute fresh broad beans with chopped onion, pine nuts, crushed garlic, cumin and coriander seeds, chopped basil and a squeeze of lemon. Serve on basmati rice. Linguine with avocado and pesto. Cook some linguine, slice an avocado, toss it all together with pesto and optionally top with shaved parmesan. Delicious. Asparagus with blue vein cheese. Quickly boil asparagus and drain, place on plate, sprinkle with crumbled blue vein cheese, capers, cracked pepper and a dash of vinaigrette. Eat with sourdough toast. Green beans in coriander sauce. Blanch a few dozen green beans and drain. Grind a teaspoonful of coriander seeds and half that amount of cumin seeds, add these to a quarter cup of vegetable stock, simmer five minutes to reduce then add a tablespoon of olive oil and a little salt and pour over green beans. Sho...

(Or so it says. Then it shows a code which goes like this: bX-w90v67. It happens all the time now; but I just ignore it, click on 'home' and up comes the dashboard. I hope it works for other bloggers. Or maybe I should just graduate to another weblog provider. But no fancy design. I like the anonymity of the Blogger template.) Caponata. Day Six of National Vegetarian Week sees us preparing this classic Sicilian dish which is often used as an accompaniment to grilled fish but is also excellent main fare. Cut two medium eggplants into one-inch (only 36 years after metric measured were introduced!) cubes, place them in a colander and sprinkle with salt. Rinse after twenty minutes and pat dry. In the meantime, slice two zucchinis into half-inch rounds; thinly slice two red deseeded capsicums and an onion. Puree two large ripe cored and diced tomatoes with a half-cup of red wine vinegar and two teaspoons of sugar. (At this time of year, just use canned diced tomatoes). Place eggpla...

Trim and cut two leeks ( allium ampeloprasum var. porrum family liliaceae ) into chunks. Check for grit, rinse if necessary, boil five minutes and drain. Combine the leeks with the zest of a lemon, a tablespoon of chopped parsley, two tablespoonsful of olive oil, a dash of sea salt and a dozen peppercorns. Cook spelt pasta - spirals - until done. Drain, combine with sauce in pan, add a tablespoonful of grated parmesan and stir over very low heat. Serve. This is one of those dishes that sounds kind of OK, looks not much better but tastes like a revelation. * (What happened to Day Four of National Vegetarian Week? It was Tracy's birthday, her mother was in town and we went out for dinner to a children-friendly place where I ate grilled trevally on mash with fresh vegetables, Tracy ordered the grilled whiting, her mother chose an excellent veal scallopini vino bianco that she reported was meltingly tender and the boys played with their spaghetti. Happy birthday.)

And so we near the end of Day Three of National Vegetarian Week , which will conclude on Saturday with a huge barbecue celebration featuring a goat on a spit. Just kidding. Today's recipe - another old favourite with which with long-term readers will be familiar is probably my favourite Indian dish of all time, apart from butter chicken, beef vindaloo, lamb korma ... Spinach Paneer Ingredients: One large bunch of spinach, washed and chopped. Oil. One tablespoonful of fenugreek leaves. 200g pack of paneer. Ghee. One teaspoon turmeric. One and a half cups just-boiled water. One half teaspoon black cumin seeds. One tablespoon ground coriander. One teaspoon chilli powder. One teaspoon finely grated ginger. One teaspoon salt. One half teaspoon sugar. One cup yogurt. Method: Paneer is made without rennet, and so is suitable for vegetarians. Put the spinach with the water that clings to it into a pan over a low heat, together with a dash of oil and the fenugreek leaves. While the spinach ...

Of course, I'm no vegetarian but many of my friends are. It's a matter of degree. Some vegetarians gaze longingly into butcher shop windows after lunching on burgers made out of soybean; others eat only windfall fruit from disused orchards and sip the morning dew from wild buttercups. A vegetarian acquaintance of mine fries up panfuls of imitation bacon, although it is imitation only in that it comes in rashers; it certainly doesn't smell like bacon. Maybe that's the idea. Apparently the smell of bacon is what causes most vegetarians to fall off the wagon. For Day Two of National Vegetarian Week, a salad that is on high rotation in our kitchen. It's a once-a-weeker, at least. Warm vegetable salad with toasted pinenuts. Boil a dozen halved small potatoes, washed well but unpeeled, until almost soft. Slice a dozen baby roma or similar tomatoes in two. Slice a red onion into rings. Grill the flesh of a large red capsicum until blackened, then cool, peel, cut into strip...

It was a sunny spring morning and I was driving south on the Monash tollway - maximum speed 70 km/h - and I had the radio on in the car and they were talking about National Vegetarian Week . I didn't know there was one, although there seems to be a 'week' for just about everything these days. Some very important things even get an entire year to themselves. For example, what do you think 2008 is the 'year of'? What would you think is occupying the consciousness of the world at this point in history? Yes: potatoes . Which means this year's National Vegetarian Week - occurring within the Year of the Potato like some kind of tuberous alignment of the planets - is sure to be a great success. My contributions to this momentous week will include some old favourites. So let's commence with the first. I have diplomatically remove a previous option of prosciutto in the following recipe and added capers instead for a salty kick. National Vegetarian Week, Day One: Tube...

Yes, this is why I like springtime.

Reader polls are as compelling a waste of time as you're likely to find. This one in The Australian Magazine asked readers to nominate the best Australian song of the past twenty years. Crowded House took six positions in the top twenty. Maybe not so astounding, given their uncanny ability not just to write the kinds of songs that make you remember where you were when you first heard them, but to write a lot of them. Distant Sun takes me back to a ghostgum-lined country road, driving somewhere south of Heathcote in central Victoria late on a golden Sunday afternoon. A long time ago, but it comes back with the sound of a song. Otherwise, Ed Kuepper's Black Ticket Day , something by the Go-Betweens and any number of Paul Kelly's songs could have gotten mentions. And for me, just about anything from silverchair's Diorama , on which Daniel Johns collaborated with Van Dyke Parks, beats last year's Straight Lines . But then I didn't contribute to the poll. * Oh, f...

1. Nobody knows what will happen. 2. Nobody knew two years ago, some just thought they did. 3. Nobody knew six months ago, some just thought they did. 4. Nobody knows today, some just think they do. 5. But they're no longer sure. 6. Nobody knows where money comes from. 7. Nobody knows where it goes. 8. Most importantly, nobody knows the murky places it visits along the way. 9. Because there are some places money is not supposed to go. 10. Because of this, a year ago fringe brokers were on the nose. 11. The banks loved it. 12. Because it made the banks look good. 13. And the brokers had to raise their rates. 14. Bad brokers! said the banks. Borrow from us instead! 15. But banks are not good and never were and never will be. 16. Also, banks are not clever. 17. Because they had fingers in exactly the same pies as the brokers. 18. Some they didn’t even know about. 19. But the banks soon found out. 20. And then they had to raise rates. 21. In the glare of publicity. 22. And banks hate...

I read recently of someone whose notebook computer was stolen. The computer contained most of a book he was writing and he was beside himself with terror. No backup. No printed pages. Nothing new, I suppose. I can imagine authors of old slaving away by candlelight, falling asleep at the quill and having the house burn down along with the manuscript. Sometimes I imagine Blogger - if not the entire internet - disappearing into thin air because my book is a blog. There will be seven chapters and an introduction and half of each chapter is a blog post. I printed out the first six posts - three chapters - delivered them to the commissioning publisher and breathed a little easier.

From today's Australian : Australia's winning publishers: PANPA (Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers' Association) Newspaper of the Year Awards. Highly commeded: The Sunday Age, Sunday Canberra Times, The Sunday Mail. No mention of any awards for sub-editors or proofreaders. The Australian itself picked up the Online Newspaper of the Year (Metropolitan) award. Has anyone tried getting around its online opinion pages?

The yellow sticker on the pack read "Sshhh! They're sleeping" . After mechanical debearding, Tasmanian Spring Bay mussels are shrink-wrapped into a kind of plastic oxygen chamber where they slumber blissfully for 'up to nine days', according to the pack. Certainly, they were very quiet. I wondered whether they were not in an induced coma rather than merely sleeping. I placed them very carefully into the pot of boiling fluid. What if one were to wake up seconds before being boiled to death? The fluid comprised a cup of white wine, a little olive oil, an onion, five chopped garlic cloves, and a chili - all finely chopped - and some ground pepper. The mussels were cooked in two minutes. Then a shower of chopped parsley and away you go. See how high you can stack up the shells in a side dish without letting them clatter to the table. It's an art. * The best part of this dish, besides the fat, briney, orange mussels, is mopping up the garlic-infused fluid with good...

It wasn't so much loaf as doorstop. If you put it on the ground and kicked it you would break a toe. That's a nice change from the kind of supermarket bread that weighs nothing and collapses like a bag of cotton wool when you put something as light as a newspaper on top of it in the basket. My doorstop was a loaf of Dench seeded sourdough. It would keep for a week if you could resist eating it. It's a little too dense for sandwiches of the delicate asparagus or vinegared cucumber or shaved ham kind, but it comes into its own topped robustly with home-made meatloaf, or smoked trout with capers and mayonnaise, or thick slices of mature cheddar and pickles. Dench sourdough makes great toast. Cut it thickly and toast the slices lightly , top it with butter and Vegemite and eat it with strong tea. After a breakfast like that you'll feel like hunting lions.

The Spencer Street end of town. It was one of those bars with deep shadows and retro red furniture and lampshades everywhere; and cigarette smoke drifting through the open wall-width windows from the area smokers have to go to avoid choking the people in the bar. You can tell it's an industry function because people smoke in a different way when they're networking. Kind of mechanically and efficiently, while trying to converse above the music and keying each other's phone numbers into cell phones. It's a desperate game. Every contact could mean business. Waitpeople with leg tattoos and too-short skirts plied silver trays: chicken balls glazed with sweet chilli, rice rolls tied up like parcels with dipping sauce, savoury pastries, and things you couldn't make out in the semi-darkness. The paper napkins were sensibly black because you can't see the smudge of chilli sauce when you mop it away from your face. Things were bad, was the general consensus. Are you busy?...