What I cooked last night.

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.