What I Cooked Last Night

Alexandra, with early morning hair, and books. William at the same age. Thomas, same age.

It was the second white Christmas in five years, if you count hail. Christmas was back at the golf course after three years. A dozen tables sat under shady umbrellas outside the clubhouse, on a rise of lawn overlooking the fairways. That’s where lunch was supposed to be served. But the rain came first. I watched it come. A little earlier, a massive black thing in the sky way out west had grown larger and loomed over the city, and had then started aiming hail at us as we hit the Eastern Freeway. I thought it might overshoot and fade to the southeast. Wrong. I took the exit ramp at Bulleen Road, crossed the freeway, turned right into the Boulevard, and right again back over the freeway along a narrow bridge road that ended at a steel gate. By this time it was a torrent. The gate slid open and we drove through and stopped out the front of the clubhouse. They were huddled under the eave and inside looking out at the storm. It raged. Way below, the fairways were white carpets sweeping...

Good King Wenceslaus All my childhood Christmases occured during summer heatwaves in a sunburned land characterised by wildfire, burning northerly winds and dust storms. So all those songs about cold and snow and fir trees and medieval kings fascinated me and took me away into a faraway land. Here is a song written in 1853 in Britain by an Anglican minister about a duke, a thousand years earlier, who gave to the poor in Bohemia - in order to teach children about the virtue of generosity in celebrating the birth of a Jewish child in Bethlehem another thousand years earlier - and listened to by a marvelling child in twentieth century Australia. Like a beautiful woven gown circling the world with goodwill down the ages, this song says something about Christmas. And about goodwill to all men. O Come All Ye Faithful As a child I used to think it was O Calm All Ye Faithful and I would think to myself Why are they telling everybody to relax? Maybe it's because tomorrow is Christm...

Wednesday morning, 15 December 1971 It was five in the morning when we slipped out of Eucla under the heavy cover of an oppressive darkness, car headlights blazing. The sultry heat hung over the desert like a wet tent. The landscape fell behind us faster than yesterday because we were back on a real road again and the tyres were humming instead of crunching.  At six o’clock, Uncle switched off the lights as the first rays of the sun slowly throttled the long shadows. Black turned to gold.  Seven o’clock passed, eight o’clock. If it was hot earlier, now it was like someone had switched on an oven. At twenty minutes past ten, the Valiant rolled to a stop off the road at Madura, a town that was just a fuel stop. We parked in the shade of nothing and climbed out of the sticky car into more heat.  You could just about pick it up in your hands. We took refuge in the van where it might have been 95 instead of 100.  Aunt pulled a meal out of nowhere as she did the whole j...

That's it. Goodbye email. I'm unsubscribing to everything. Tiger Airways, Start to Finish, InfoChoice, Vigor Health and Fitness, Crikey (how on earth did I get onto their list?), LinkedIn Updates, Melbourne Writers and dozens of others. (LinkedIn, by the way, sends me emails saying something to the effect that 'someone who may be connected to you has updated their profile'. Nuts.) That was yesterday. Today I got another email from Tiger Airways. So I unsubscribed again. A message came up: The following error was encountered while processing your request:   You are currently not subscribed to our newsletter.  Then why did they send it?

Tuesday morning, 14 December 1971 A threatening humidity lurked under a blanket of darkness as we hit the highway out of Ceduna around half past five in the morning, dawn a threatening red streak on the east horizon. You have to start early to make headway before the heat hits. The nearest large towns are Port Augusta, 300 miles to the east and Norseman, about three times that distance to the west. The road west runs along the bottom edge of the Nullabor Desert where it meets the section of Southern Ocean called the Great Australian Bight. Cliffs run along the coast for hundreds of miles and the sea, over millions of years, has gouged tunnels deep into them. These surface as blowholes in the plain and people, straying off the road, have fallen into them. What a horrible fate.   Today, we’re aiming to reach Eucla, driving across a red desert with nothing in it except a dirt road. The car has run like a Swiss watch so far, hasn’t missed a beat. It was a steamy, dusty, unforgettabl...

Now the old plates are turning up in mosaic-ed numbers for houses as Christmas gifts for relatives, an 'office' sign for the kindergarten, and some other projects. "But why not bone china?" I had asked, continuing a somewhat convoluted conversation of a week or so ago. It does not fracture or chip easily, is the answer. And when it does, its shards are uneven and very, very sharp. Bone china is hard because it is manufactured using bones. I have tested knowledge of this fact on a small research group, and it was not universally known. In fact, there was some surprise expressed. Which raises a question. If you have friends over for dinner, and they are vegetarians, and you cook up some wonderful vegetarian food, and you serve it on your best crockery, which is bone china; should you admit to your friends the awful truth that they are eating their vegetarian meals off plates made from the ground-up bones of dead cows ? Or not? * The oldest bone china item I have ...

A few posts ago , I tried to justify a $90 tag on a book. Forget it. Dymock's has knocked $20 off the price. A week before Christmas.

Research* shows that eggplants have the longest storage at home to shelf life ratio. They don't last, but we never get around to using them. There is a scientifically valid reason for this, confirmed by the same research: eggplants are much more attractive than kohlrabi, celeriac or swedes; because they are shiny and have a voluptuous bulbous shape and colour, and no strange hair. Your eyes lock onto them across the greengrocer and it's instant attraction, like at a party. I've bought more eggplants on impulse than any of those others, or beetroots or turnips or even bitter melon, which looks like something off the side of a cigarette pack's government health warning. Go on, image-google it. So when you buy an eggplant, you have to cook it. You can't refrigerate it because they don't like being cold. Here's what I did with my last eggplant. Slice a large eggplant or more smaller ones and bake the slices for twenty minutes. I don't bother with salting...

If, like me, you always cook too much rice, don't throw it out. Make a cold rice salad to eat as a side dish in this steamy, hot, stormy weather. Take three cups of leftover basmati rice, one can lentils (drained), half a red onion (diced), juice of one lemon. Combine. Chill. Simple but good. * In the garden, the cos lettuce (plural) have their hands up. "Pick me!" they could be saying. I'll pick them but we might retire the cos next season. Caesar salad must have been invented to use up cos lettuce, because it doesn't seem good for much else. Perhaps I've just had too much, like Peter (or was it Benjamin?) who had to be given chamomile. Any recipes for cos that don't dress it up in bacon and egg? * I came home to find Tracy smashing the crockery. Beautiful old plates, all in shards. "What are you doing?" I asked, redundantly. She grasped the redundancy adroitly and returned: "What does it look like I'm doing, playing t...

That’s the end of an era. Two boys at school. Thomas is no longer a pre-schooler; had his school orientation day yesterday, December 6. He doesn’t start officially until February, but he went along for the morning, wearing William’s spare uniform. He had been looking forward to it for weeks. He will be fine at school with the luxury of a brother one class ahead. William was the pioneer, his first weeks at school starting with a huge smile of goodbye at the gate masking wet eyes. We stayed for the principal’s address and walked away and left Thomas around ten o’clock. The morning peak had died and the streets were empty and quiet. Then the church bell tolled, and the sound rumbled across the suburb. Perhaps it was for St Nicholas’ Day. I don’t know. Perhaps they rang it for the new Preps on their orientation morning. Perhaps they were just practising; the bell is being converted to electric operation following restoration of the church after the 2008 fire . * I told the boys th...

An old favourite for these warmer nights: Pasta with tomatoes and fresh ricotta You barely need a recipe. The fresh summery ingredients fall into each other’s arms like new lovers. Boil up a pot of pasta. Tagliatelle or fettucine will help take up the wettish sauce. Warm some olive oil in a pan large enough to take the cooked pasta; add a finely chopped onion and a chopped garlic clove. Warm through and cook gently until softened but not browned. Add six chopped vine-ripened tomatoes, and salt and pepper. The tomatoes should be very ripe and juicy. If not juicy enough, add a dash of white wine to the mix. Cook five minutes on gentle heat until the tomatoes break down and cry tears of sweet summertime flavour. Drain pasta when done, add to the pan, fold through sauce. Crumble ricotta and add, fold through lightly. Serve immediately. Dust with parmesan, add torn strips of fresh basil. Mop up sauce with fresh bread dipped in olive oil.

One good thing about having children decades apart is that you can compare practices then and now and bore everyone with your insistence that things were much better then. Things weren't better then. They were just different. Children didn't walk around bristling with electronic devices in the early 1980s; they walked around bristling with hand-held games and Casio watches and Transformers. The telephone was on the wall. Teenagers used it just as much; they just couldn't take it to bed. One thing is different: children's birthday parties. There are more of them. We're averaging one a week for William and Thomas from their friends at school and kindergarten. You can't attend all of them. Occasionally these birthday parties are hosted in the child's actual house, where their mother serves party food and cake. Increasingly, however, people other than parents host the party and it is held off the premises in cavernous places that used to be warehouses or f...

Hat from Sire's Menswear, Coburg; water pistol care of Max's birthday party. Crisp white shirt his own.

And here's the one that was too big to carry around town last week. Are books expensive? Unanswerable. Is a $90 book too expensive? Unanswerable, but the answer is no, anyway. You can put $90 into your tank and tear it up in an afternoon driving down the coast, but the $90 book takes you around the world and not just once and you keep it for life. I can't see a book of this scale (hardback, 480 pages) making much margin even at the price. They sell glossy magazines a tenth of the weight at a quarter the price and full of nothing. Nor are books subsidised by ads for watches and Burberry and single barrel Scotch. This is not a cook book. They just sell it out of that section because there are recipes in it. It's a two-kilogram rebuke to purists who insist that only those who hail from such parts may write about them. Christine Manfield an expert on India? She is now. Buy it for the photography. Not of food; though that is there. The teeming cities; the mysterious wate...

Here's William at the same age of fifteen months. Hose off the dirt and you'd mistake one for the other. The hair is identical; Tom's was always straight.

That was yesterday. She sat in my chair and smiled. Today she wore yellow, and there was a trip to town; two bookshops, one retail store (other) and the State Library. But before all that, coffee. Brunetti is 75 metres - to the inch - from Flinders Street station if you don't count the platform, escalators and steps. I had coffee (Vienna); Tracy cappucino. The children (Thomas and Alexandra) ate a coarse-sugar dusted doughnut, Italian-style. It was fat and doughy and fresh, and then it was just some grains of sugar on a plate and more grains on their faces. Dymock's is downstairs off Collins. Dymock's recently announced expansion plans. You can see why. Their staff are knowledgeable and the book selection is as good as it gets in a chain bookstore. Dymock's is also soaking up the foot traffic from the defunct Angus & Robertson and Borders, the latter of whose staff were in turn snooty, unobtainable, uninterested or even disinterested. By contrast, Dymock'...

The post directly under this one may have restored my brother's faith in simple parties . (Just last Thursday, I sat at the place he occupies; he was diagonally opposite; Alexandra was in a high-chair at the place occupied by our sister. We had lunch.) That was July 1969. What else happened that month? Nothing much. 43 years later, our mother is still feeding us. Just not so often.

Yes, he's grown . (He's not a Footscray fan, they gave out the caps at kindergarten as a kind of early recruitment drive. He remains true to the Same Olds, but the cap is handy.)

The only hand-held devices you can use at this restaurant are your knife and fork. "Only six months ago we never saw an iPad, but I've had a two-year-old in here with an iPad - it's a joke," co-owner Nabil Kurban said. "We are just letting people know that being at the dinner table for the family is the most valuable time of the day so that people can say, 'How are you, how's your day, is everything OK?' "It's a very special moment. We are just asking for one hour a day - no gadgets at the dinner table."

In a pan, soften two very finely chopped onions in oil. Add some ghee for a richer flavour. Place a dozen cashews, one large can of coconut cream, a teaspoon of chili, a knob of peeled and chopped ginger the size of your thumb, a large clove of garlic (or two small), half a teaspoon each of cinnamon and garam masala, two cardamom pods and a couple of rays of star anise (optional) into a food processor. Hit ‘turbo’. Watch as the colours homogenise. Listen as the initial nut grind goes into a high-pitched turbine-smooth whizz. Twenty seconds and you will have a pinkish beige sludge flecked with small pieces of cashew. The aroma will make you want to spoon it out of the processor and eat it now. Steep a couple of tablespoons of raisins in hot water to which you have added a teaspoon of turmeric. Remove half of the onion from the pan, reserve. Transfer cashew and coconut cream mixture to the pan. Drain the raisins and add. Stir and cook very gently for ten minutes. Add a little wate...

Every now and then the weekend papers have something worth reading, such as how to write a song and how to write a movie score . And both in the one magazine. Quote: Morricone says when he was young he tried to improve some mediocre films. "I tried to put some really strong music and accelerated them too much, and the result was way too strong for the film. It was [as] if you dressed a parrot like a cardinal."

The visitors left on Sunday. We had been out all day and, by late afternoon when we returned, the swarm had gone; although some late risers were still buzzing around the temporary hive. To where they have flown I don’t know. I hope it’s not in the roof. Around a thin branch deep in the old weigela shrub, the bees left a temporary hive structure that was several opaque white semi-cylindrical sections of honeycomb-patterned wax in a cascading form that resembled a modernist chandelier in the stairwell of a 1950s public building.

I kept bumping into Occupy Melbourne last Friday. I was in town for the day, working in an office in Collins Street, fifty metres from the mess of tents in the City Square. I went out mid-morning for an apple from the Swanston Street fruit stall. By that time the eviction was commencing and I passed between rows of protesters holding placards made from brown cardboard that was wet because of the drizzle. At lunchtime I went out for sushi from the cheap sushi shop in Capitol arcade where you get free miso with your order. The intersection of Collins and Swanston was at a standstill and several trams were stuck in the throng. It looked like Wellington Parade on a Saturday afternoon after the football in the 1950s when trams lined up to ferry thousands back into town. It was raining now, and the police were telling the protestors to go home. Why wouldn’t you? The City Square is an ugly concrete slab with patches of hard sand. A dreadful place to camp. The shouting had begun. A man weari...

I’ve done it again. Volunteered. This time it’s a 125th anniversary publication for a college. My mother and two of my sisters walked through its gates in the 1940s and the 1960s/1970s respectively. But that’s incidental. The school shares its archivist with the school that was the subject of the book I finished last year, and she asked me if I’d do one for the second school. I said yes because this one will be shorter. But it still has to be done. I said yes also because, in a strange twist of coincidence, the archivist was my Grade Three teacher in 1965 and it is ingrained in one to say yes to one’s teachers. (Yes, she was young – 1965 was her first year out of teacher’s college.) * The college archive was in a cramped office in one of the old wings that was once the nuns’ living quarters. Across one entire wall was one of those sliding compactus things that holds sixty million documents in no particular order. Me and my big mouth. I went to the 1960s and pulled out some annuals...

Four is grown up, but not. Mr Four is a small and generally self-possessed gentleman who suffers occasional unfortunate fits of uncontrollable laughter. But Mr Four has dignity. It is the last great age of childhood before they go to school and get corrupted and bring home the schoolyard’s whining jargon, and want what the others want. In the morning he comes to the corner and holds his fat arms around my neck and kisses me. Then he lets go, and waves, and runs brightly back around the corner and I go away, and when I come back at night he is always asleep, his eyes tight slits sloping down and his mouth half open, like his baby photo . * Years ago, there was another four-year-old. He was just the same. I must have been twelve, off to school. It is winter, 1969. He comes to the gate with the same self-possession. The same kiss, the same arms around the neck. I wonder now if I was as patient with my brother as I am with his nephew, my son. * Thomas turns five this weekend. An...

I looked out the front window. It was a warm, cloudless afternoon, but the room had almost imperceptibly darkened, as if a cloud had passed the sun. There was something in the air, like smoke, or a dust storm. I went outside and into the front garden. The flowers were out, and the shrubs were in bloom, and the garden was looking nice, and the thing in the air was bees. Thousands of them. They were flying around in ever decreasing circles like fighter planes homing in on an enemy base. They were silent. I thought swarming bees would buzz but the only hum came from a light plane cutting a line in the northern sky towards Essendon airport. The bees were circling the old weigela. It could be sixty years old. It's about ten feet tall and almost as wide. It still flowers well, but inside it is like an old hedge with thick gnarled inner branches. By five o’clock they had settled. How many bees are there in a swarm? It’s the size and shape of a bagpipes, pendulous at the bottom an...

I had some fish left over after a lunch of rolls with avocado, salad shoots and smoked salmon, which was a rare luxury put on for friends who had visited along with their new addition to the family for some socialisation with our children. The new addition was a two-month old maltese terrier poodle cross, light brown in colour, a tiny round roly-poly thing, name of Boxer. They should have called it Malteser. They live in an apartment and have no children. We sat outside and the dog acted as if he thought he had been re-released into the wild. Apparently all dogs are 99% wolf in terms of DNA, or appetite, or mating habits, or brain power, or something. This creature was woolly and scampered over the lawn like a spring lamb and was therefore by definition a wolf in sheep's clothing. That night I cooked up a pot full of pasta - bavette - drained it and simply added twirls (for forkability) of the salmon, a generous dollop of sour cream and a shower of cracked black pepper. Delicious...

I don’t watch grand finals. Never have. I don’t like the angles or the commentary or the crowd shots or the stupid continuous slow motion replays. I listen to the radio so I can track the action in my own mind. I’ve watched one grand final in twenty years and it’s the only one I can’t remember. I took the boys to the indoor pool. They’d set it up with team balloons and the broadcast over the loudspeaker and after the first quarter we were the only ones there, plus the attendants and a few lane-swimming die-hards who barely raised their heads all afternoon, so it was our own private grand final pool party. William and I tossed tennis balls to each other and Tom practised his dives. Half time came and with it the 'entertainment'. Someone had booked an entertainer by the name of Meatloaf. He used to be a singer. I thought it was just the pool loudspeakers, but when he sang, he sounded like a man having a heart attack and a nervous breakdown simultaneously, to save time. Or Bri...

Cool climate? It was cold. I turned the heater switch to warm and opened the little grates in the dash. The country at the back of Ballarat was high and green and there was no sky between the ground and the clouds. They seemed to sit on the hills. The rain had stopped. It turned out to be the wettest September day in fifty years but I didn’t know that then. I was driving on a single-lane B road with no line markings. I hadn’t seen a car since Clunes, a small town with verandah-shaded shops hugging the empty winding main street. The streets always wind in old gold mining towns because they grew up around the diggings. No planners involved. Out of Clunes and on past old mounds of slag overgrown with grasses, and into the green made almost luminous by the teary sky. The Irish came here in their thousands and stayed after the gold rush; it reminded them of home. Now I was higher. The clouds sat; no blue anywhere. Then the green hills started growing trellises bearing curling shoots. W...

The boys have been trained well and, as we head towards summer, are already asking to dine en plein air . Not that I would use such a pretentious foreign phrase in conversation, much less attribute it to my children; but I must say I do prefer the French version to the cliched al fresco , even though the former refers more correctly to painting. I relented and we ate outside despite several very good objections to the plan, including having no table to sit at and no barbecue coals. The first drawback was fixed by a blanket on the lawn and the second by cooking inside. (The table problem was caused by a very cheap outdoor table purchased from Bunnings cracking after one summer. Perhaps you're supposed to store outdoor tables inside to stop UV damage. To replace it, I'm looking for a cheap old op-shop table instead of wasting more money on plastic that falls apart.) I sliced four red-eye potatoes and fried the slices in a mixture of ghee and oil. These were presented piled hi...

Barry Dickins used to write satirical restaurant reviews about real restaurants. He took his material from life and then embellished it, but in character. The embellishing brought the lawsuits. He liked to destroy the egos, the pretensions, the fake grandiosity - like theatre without drama - of an industry whose bible was a guide for travelling salesmen published by a tyre company. One of Dickins' best, and possibly most notorious, reviews was about a long-gone restaurant in South Yarra (Glo Glo's? Two Faces?) in which he savagely satirised the French-accented waiter whose real name he alleged was Wayne. They sued. Dickins lost. It wasn't Wayne. It was Craig. Or something like that. Dickins wrote books, plays, poetry. He wrote for The Age , the Herald Sun , the Melbourne Times and anyone else brave enough to publish him. He supplied illustrations for the articles he wrote. Some were unpublishable, others got through. Dickins was fringe because he didn't fit anyone...

Omelettes? Who makes omelettes any more? I can't even spell them. I took three tries to get it right and I'm still not sure. Omelette? I haven't seen an omelette in years. My mother made one once with cheese in it. Mmmm. I'm warming to the idea. Forget the spelling. Take a cast iron pan. Oil it. Chop a leek finely into thin rings. Chop a red capsicum finely into equally thin albeit larger rings. Lightly beat half a cup of milk into four eggs. Add salt and pepper. Add three cummin seeds and a pinch of dried basil. Line the cast iron pan with the leek rings. Add the capsicum. Place the pan on the stove and turn on the heat to get the pan warming up. When it's almost hot pour over the eggs. Place a lid over the pan. Turn down the heat. Walk away. Come back in ten minutes. How it turns out depends on your pan and the heat and your technique. I placed a plate upside down over the pan, and flipped them over, and it came out cleanly, like a tarte tatin; the leek...

I keep getting invitations from people on LinkedIn whose 'profile' says they have, for example, 438 contacts. And they're on Facebook as well? I glanced into the window of a Brunswick Street North restaurant the other night on one of my evening runs. The snapshot image was of diners oblivious to each other and staring into smartphones, right thumbs flicking obsessively, while a lonely ignored waiter forlornly distributed plates of food. They call it social networking.

One of the benefits of working from home is that I can pick up the children from school and kindergarten. Last Friday William came out of school with a heavier bag than usual. He pulled out a wrapped package. The wrapped package was a prize in the annual Father's Day raffle. He gave it to me. I opened it. Inside was a bottle of Mt Avoca sauvignon blanc and two carefully boxed crystal wine glasses. In this nanny state era of juvenile warnings on food products and alcohol bottles there is something amusing about a 6-year-old winning a bottle of wine at school. The wine was a 2005 vintage, so someone had had it for a while before donating it for the raffle. Most SB is young and acid, but this had some colour and tasted of butterscotch or something else sweet and rich. Sacher torte? Almond tart? Key lime pie? That's probably closer. We drank it - 'we' meaning Tracy and me - on Sunday night, Father's Day, with pasta with asparagus in a light cream sauce. Nothing sp...

Literally. I'm painting the house. Most of the weatherboards are in good condition but some of the old paint is cracked and dry - to quote Tom Jones - particularly the east-facing side, which is subject to fierce morning summer sun; while the west is shaded by the building next door and the north unaffected, shaded by the eave during the height of summer. The good news is you don't have to go to Bunnings. One of Australia's last remaining independent paint manufacturers, Viponds, produces a top-quality product for less than the Bunnings price on other brands. Viponds is in Norris Street, North Coburg and the customer carpark is ten steps from the door and you can look at the vintage paint cans in the display cabinet while you wait for your paint to be mixed.

Foghorns could be heard from the bay most of last Sunday, a mournful sound that bounced off the dead flat sea and echoed up the hill. The Port of Melbourne must be a busy place. Everything we buy comes from China and it comes by ship and they don't stop on Sundays. Despite the haze, there was a warmth in the air. In the early afternoon, we went down the hill to the beach. You couldn’t see twenty yards out to sea or up or down the beach. A thick, swirling pale yellow mist was rolling off the water and breaking up through the ti-tree like dry-ice smoke in an amateur stage production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night , assisted in this imagery by continued foghorns. Then the fog was gone, exiting stage south, and the sun came out of the yellow, and the stage was restored to its proper size. Two ships were passing each other on the horizon. The boys were in the water now. Baby Alexandra crept through the sand and down to the water's edge and then straight in, just like her br...

The lettuce in several varieties are trying hard but succumbing to bugs. But the mustard greens are holding their heads high. Even the snails and grubs won't touch them, thanks to their strong flavour, I suppose (I'm not sure how you get to prove that). Got mustard greens in plenty? Try: - Using them in place of spinach in filo pastries with fetta - Boiling them with fenugreek (fresh or toasted seeds) and mixing with yogurt and a good dash of salt for a delicious Indian-inspired recipe. Good with vindaloo as a cooling side dish. * One entire viburnum tinus hedge in the back garden: gone. I planted it in 2005 when we moved here. It got to seven feet tall within five years, a magnificent hedge with small white flowers that attract bees. One of those thousands of species of bugs that followed the breaking of the drought last year got it. Apparently viburnum is prone to the problem. Spraying would kill the bees, defeating the point of growing a flowering hedge. I tried pre...

Saturday morning. I switched on the radio. You know the program. I mention it often enough. The voice was familiar. It was Ross Wilson. The song was At The Rock House . That finished and another Daddy Cool song came on. On 3RRR? Why not, of course. But there had to be a reason. It’s 2011. Surely not forty years since Eagle Rock? Surely yes. Daddy Cool was always part parody. You could tell by the name. No serious rock band would choose it. In an interview (no link available) Ross Wilson says "we were loving the forms but taking the p--- (sic: they print far more objectionable words in the papers, why not this?) at the same time". Wilson was especially keen to excavate the piano-based boogie-woogie sound he first discovered in his Dad’s jazz record collection. ... But in crafting a distinctive Daddy Cool sound, which suggested what he called "a past you never had", Wilson also plundered R&B and jukebox pop as well. Wilson says everyone remembers when they fi...

The other night I made a simple pasta dish of spaghetti with garlic, olive oil, anchovies and finely chopped fresh chili. It needed something on the side. I did not have leaves of any kind so I made a salad out of some items that just happened to be there. The salad got out of control. It turned into the main event. Warm salad of roasted pumpkin, fennel, avocado and kidney beans. I had some leftover oven-roasted pumpkin and a head of fennel that resembled a miniature bagpipes. There were a few other potential ingredients vying for inclusion. How to bring them together? Here's how: Chop the fennel into manageable pieces. It will fall into an array of j-curves and other fantastic three-dimensional shapes, allowing you to marvel at the geometry of nature while you construct a mega-salad. Re-heat the cooked pumpkin if you want a ‘warm’ salad; otherwise, add it to the salad straight from the fridge. Open one can of kidney beans. Drain. Halve and section one avocado (relati...

The Sunday roast was a childhood fixture. Let me qualify that. It was a fixture until I was about ten years of age, then it slowly disappeared, like the Latin Mass at about the same time. Perhaps there were too many children to feed. Maybe my mother went through a vegetarian phase, or just couldn’t be bothered doing it any more. I don’t remember. The era passed. While the tradition lasted, the roast was usually ovine. That is to say, sheep. But not lamb. This concept is completely foreign to modern sensibilities: Not lamb? What other kind of edible sheep is there? The same kind actually; just older. The roast we were served was often leg of two-tooth, two-tooth being a farmers’ reference (my grandmother was raised in southern NSW) to a sheep of more than 12 months, otherwise known as hogget; or sometimes leg of mutton, from a sheep older than two years. Lamb is generally considered more tender … but two-tooth, or mutton, cooked properly, had more flavour. And was larger. We were sti...