What I Cooked Last Night

The first time I visited New South Wales was by river. I swam across the Murray when I was a teenager. Why walk across the bridge when you can swim? I wouldn't do it now; happy to read a book by the bank while the sun goes down. I never read before mid-afternoon. One of those habits you slip into after a lifetime of enforced academic and, later, work-related reading. But I'll read well into the night, light and eyelids permitting. Right now, it was the time of night when the birds in the trees have shut up at last and the only sound was the far-off groan of trucks on the Murray Valley Highway. The book started this way: I had just finished breakfast and was filling my pipe when I got Bullivant's telegram. It was at Furling, the big country house in Hampshire where I had come to convalesce after Loos, and Sandy, who was in the same case, was hunting for the marmalade. All right, that brings me to another curious first. This was the first book I read completely online: ...

2012 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the first Christmas celebrated in my mother's house. She and my father moved into the just-built house during 1952, after spending the first eighteen months of their marriage living in her mother and father's house in Ascot Vale; the second half of that period with a baby. West Essendon was a new suburb then, with nothing farther west except thistle and the Maribyrnong river valley. Over the years Christmas lunch attendance grew as six babies followed the first, receded as grown-up children pulled up roots and ventured overseas, and then grew again when they returned and settled down and had their own families. We all thought the annual Christmas event would eventually become a moveable feast, but it hung on grimly in Deakin Street, staunchly defending moves to extricate it to new surrounds, failing only one year during the innovative '80s when some brave pioneer thought a Christmas picnic at Brimbank Park might be a good idea. Not a...

This is the kind of thing that is ridiculed by the purists and loved by everyone else. I walked half a mile to the dusty Foodworks supermarket in the small country town that the river winds through - or should I say the town built around several bends in the river - and bought a tin of cream of chicken soup, a packet of grated parmesan cheese and some fresh button mushrooms. From its wine shop annex, I bought a bottle of Deakin Estate chardonnay. Then back to the river. I set some water to boil over the flame and, in a pan on a cooler part of the fire, I warmed some arborio rice in olive oil. When  the water bubbled I carefully and gradually poured some into the rice, interspersing it with white wine. I opened the tin of cream of chicken soup and folded the contents through the simmering rice, once again gradually. Its aroma was so good I was tempted to eat some of the salty, chickeny ooze straight out of the can. (I actually did this as a child - canned soup concentrate is del...

My sister is two years and six months in the photo, taken by my father one hot January day in 1966, with date and location written on the back. Question: which Melbourne CBD building hosted this rooftop carnival? The fragment of building in the background may give a clue. Or not. Take a wild guess in comments below. Answer in a couple of days.

If you have the ingredients, this is easily achievable when camping if you’re good at juggling pots and pans over a slow fire. Not literally, of course; although that no doubt would entertain your fellow campers should the river rolling by cease to amuse. In any case, couscous is just instant pasta and the lamb is just a straightforward stew with a few exotic spices. But the aroma! If you thought the last recipe was an outdoor drawcard, don’t cook this in a busy campsite. A kilogram of onions gently frying with cinnamon and raisins? Paddlesteamers would tie up. * Place one kilogram of cubed lamb, a big chopped onion and 1.75 litres of water into a large pot over hot embers. When it comes to the boil, throw in a teaspoon each of ginger and cinnamon, four cloves and a good shake each of salt and ground black pepper. Too easy so far. Open a cold beer. Keep the pot on a low simmer for half the afternoon; i.e., from lunchtime to afternoon tea, or from that to dinnertime. (Or ditt...

Janis Gore of Gone South is now posting at Radar Love . I like the music references.

'Big, sharp and dangerous' is how one gardening writer described rose bush Lorraine Lea's thorns. 'So don't plant one near driveways or pathways,' the writer continued.  I have one in the front garden but clear of the pathway. I did, however, almost sever a tendon when pushing the lawn mower under an arched Lorraine Lea branch, and a thorn cut through the top knuckle of my clenched fist like a shark's fin cutting the water. At least it was a clean cut. Lorraine Lea is also a climber. A few years ago, after pulling out a too-rampant jasmine, I put one in the east sideway where, once it reached the top of the fence, it could ramble. About twelve feet away, I planted another rose: Albertine. Twelve feet wasn't enough. Albertine is winning the turf war, its unusually narrow stems overtaking Lorraine Lea, and its soft, smallish delicate pink buds now appearing to grow on Lorraine Lea stems. Lorraine's are a denser pink with a faint yellow tinge....

So they turned Victoria Bitter back into a beer, reissued the earlier pack design and brought back the old advertising line, a hard-earned thirst needs a big cold beer . Good*. I cooked up the following stew while camping along the Murray River recently. Browning the meat takes a little extra effort and an additional implement or two. Optionally you can throw the whole lot in together. When your pot starts steaming, the aroma will drift along the bank and you'll have visitors. Beef with beer. In a large pot over the camp fire, place one chopped onion, a dash of oil, 500g diced beef (dredged in seasoned flour and browned), a chopped carrot, two sticks of chopped celery, a bay leaf or two, a chopped leek, a sprig of thyme, two tablespoons of tomato puree or paste, a tablespoon of brown sugar, one can of Victoria Bitter and enough beef stock to cover. Let it bubble away for a few hours. Serve with potatoes wrapped in foil and buried in the coals for an hour or two ...

The last thing the world needs now is another chorizo recipe. Chorizo is a cliché. Pick up any newspaper or magazine and there’s a recipe for chorizo. But there’s a reason. It’s good; the dried Spanish-style sausage is packed with chilli and garlic. It pairs well with pasta as long as all the ingredients are robust. I use rigatoni instead of the usual clichéd penne. Recipe Cook 250g rigatoni. Halfway through, place one or two chorizo sausages in the cooking water. Cook five minutes more. Drain. Combine pasta in a pot with a tablespoon of good olive oil, a drained tin of borlotti beans and half a tin of diced tomatoes. Slice chorizo, fold through pasta, place in serving bowels, add halved cherry tomatoes and a little crumbled feta. That covers most of Europe.

Wouldn't normally post a picture of a face-painted child but the quality of the artwork was outstanding in this case. He'd been to a party. Thomas turns six tomorrow. Here he is at a few days old in 2006. I can see a bit of tiger about him now, come to think of it. * I'm the king of the jungle They call me the tiger man I'm the king of the jungle They call me tiger man If you cross my path You'll take your own life in your hands (Lewis/Burns)

Late in the afternoon, we were on a beach on the southern side of the Murray River. The sky was that shocking blue you get in the inland and the day was still hot. The river was flowing north-east, which means the beach was on one of those bends that doubles back on itself, a billion-year-old fluke of nature. The water was silent and deadly. You could see the current out towards the middle; fast busy wrinkles that would have you downstream in a flash. The boys waded to a small island near the shore that was just mud with an ancient gum tree growing in it. The gum was bent and its lower limbs dragged in the flowing water and it looked like an old fisherman trying to hold a net. No wonder the aborigines saw spirits in everything; the quality of light and the depth of the shadows out here makes figures of everything. They practised going along in the softer current close to shore. I stood downstream a little and showed them how to swim towards the bank with the flow, and not against i...

Dropped down into the tea tree to the west flashed; colours sat moved along red head blue sun flashing; gold wings? gone. Thomas saw it first. Seven am on a spring morning.

It was one of those cold nights that creep up on you in early spring. I was on the train. Every passenger was wired, but they call them customers these days. "Attention all customers: the 7.40 from Frankston has been cancelled due to overhead works. Fingers tapping and flicking. Necks craned down. Eyes fixed on screens. Automatons. Earlier that day, one of my clients – a consumer goods manufacturer – had asked me for help with his Facebook page; meaning his company's Facebook page, not his own personal Facebook page. Yes! Companies have Facebook pages! The page's message board or wall or whatever the thing is called had been beset with negative comments about one of its products. Many were factually incorrect, some were abusive, and some were unpublishable in mainstream media. He wanted to design a kind of pseudo app within the page that would get complaints off the wall and into a forum so that the comments could be sorted and the genuine ones dealt with individually...

Obscure quiz question: what’s so special about the following football score? Carlton 18.6.114 Richmond 10.9.69 Answer at the end of this post. (If you’ve already picked it, you are a football tragic with an eye for detail, or a Richmond fan who never forgets.) * Richmond was Struggletown for most of the twentieth century, a hazy suburb of worker's cottages jammed in amongst factories that made glue and paint and matches. The Bryant and May matchworks and the Rosella cannery employed thousands. When there was a northerly, the smoke from the factories drifted across the river and got in the eyes of South Yarra residents. * Every year I spend four weeks – sometimes more – in Richmond, one of the world's great inner suburbs. It's work; but I like to pretend it's a holiday. I enjoy walking the narrow streets at lunchtimes, gazing at the mostly renovated worker's cottages amongst the jumble of factories, warehouses and buildings of no clear description that c...

Sweet potato has been cheap lately. I like it cubed and cooked and turned into a warm salad with torn spinach and segments of vine-ripened tomato and toasted pine nuts, all dressed with a mixture of vinegar, lemon juice, horseradish and a touch of mayonnaise. A large bowl of that makes a meal in itself, if you add a couple of freshly poached eggs and some lightly-toasted batons of Turkish bread. But here’s how I cooked it recently: Sweet potato gnocchi. Peel and chop one Beauregard sweet potato. Boil it until soft. Mash it or press it through a ricer, and place it in a mound on a bread board or marble work bench. Let it cool for ten minutes. Open a bottle of shiraz and pour a glass. Now make a crater in the top of the mound. Crack one egg and the yolk of another into the crater. Using your hands, gradually work in up to half a cup of flour, a scant tablespoonful of polenta and a finely diced clove of garlic. Press and knead the mixture lightly, adding more flour until it hol...

It's been a big week. I minded a two-year-old for two days, launched a book, had lunch with my mother, took a five-year-old for blood tests (all clear), wrote a million stupid words for clients, read a primary school Principal's weekly bulletin in which he lambasted parents of children making their First Communion for noisily using iPhones and other devices in the church during the ceremony, pulled out a now-shaded climbing rose and planted lawn in its place, made two days' worth of gravy beef and mushroom casserole, and read Squadron Airborne by Elleston Trevor. I'm going home to a big marbled steak, cooked rare on a red-hot cast iron pan, with a slew of fragrant garlic butter on top; and served with whipped potatoes and silver beet from the garden cooked with garlic and cracked pepper and pureed with a touch of cream. I would also pull the cork out of a bottle of Mt Alexander shiraz, but these days they come with a screwcap.

Not only has word verification outlived its usefulness; it is also now counterproductive, having become completely unreadable, thereby preventing humans - let alone robots - from posting comments. So I've switched it off. In any case, the verification function is a relic from the days when weblogs were cutting edge social media and targetted by spammers. Now we're as old hat as sending birthday cards and thank-you notes through the mail. Presumably robots are no longer interested, and are trying to ingratiate themselves with the Twitter crowd. We'll see. Meantime, commenting is easy again.

Last time I was at Florentino’s Cellar Bar, which was on a cold, wet Friday night years ago (the review is somewhere in this weblog), I had a robust dish of pasta tossed through with black pudding and pine nuts. It was very good. But you have to like black pudding. (The Cellar Bar is a cafe-society style dining room where there is no artifice, Italian cafe traditions endure, the food is robust, and old-fashioned gingham lives on .) I’ve replicated that dish, with variations, many times since. Here's its latest incarnation. Rigatoni with black pudding, broad beans and roasted tomatoes. Drizzle some olive oil and shake some cracked pepper and salt over two dozen cherry tomatoes - or other miniature variety - and roast them until they collapse. Slice black pudding into rounds about the size of a ten cent piece (use smooth black pudding rather than the Scottish type which is flecked with oats) and fry on both sides until slightly crisp. Pod and peel a bowlful of broad beans...

I was going to post some of the children's art, however illustrator and retired RAAF Squadron Leader Hugh Dolan has beaten me to it. Here's William's illustration of a First World War dogfight; and here's Thomas' picture of a Sopwith Camel.

The sun crept across the pale painted wall of the shed in the back garden at 7am for the first time since autumn. It couldn’t reach the wall that early during winter, being lower in the sky. Now we get an extra burst of reflected light in the south-facing kitchen. The warmth is welcome. Even the creatures think so. Last night I saw the season’s first huntsman, crawling along the side fence. It’s less than a fortnight ago that I passed, while walking home through Yarra Park on a bitterly cold Melbourne night, someone walking one of those snow dogs that has those piercing pale blue irises. Nothing unusual about that? The dog was wearing a coat. Spring warmth comes in on the arms of a vicious spring wind. Everything is covered in blossom. It would have been nice to see it sit on the trees a bit longer. Seems to have lasted only days. And the work begins. I pulled out ten metres of rocket and wondered whether we’ll ever plant it again. Put it in pesto; make salad; that’s it. Then it ...

Some spelling errors, typos, literals – call them what you like – mess with your mind. I once ordered 'parched eggs' in a cafe knowing full well what they were. The other day I saw a sign in a deli that said: 'mindless bacon, $15.99 a kilo'. M is nowhere near R on a keyboard so who knows how that one occurred? I was buying bacon to make an old recipe that the children have come to adopt as one of their favourites. One out of three of the children on a moderate day - and two out of three one a finicky day - will not eat eggs; while the third – who does eat eggs – will only eat the yolk. Yet all three will slurp up spaghetti carbonara. Hide the eggs in something else! (Perhaps we also should bring back the 1960s egg flip: to a litre of creamy milk in a blender, add two tablespoons of sugar, two eggs, and a dash of vanilla essence. Blend. Pour the delicious bubbling unctuous fluid into tall glasses and top with nutmeg. Retro flavour explosion! I want one now. They w...

Two years. A thousand emails. Dozens of letters. Days hunched over a keyboard, putting together a book about a school. Editing submissions – some illegible, some unintelligible, some beautiful diamonds – from past students and teachers; tapping out every letter, removing endless capitalisation of Supposedly Important Words, putting paragraph breaks in pages of never-ending text. Going through a million arch folders in a crypt-like archive room watched in eerie silence by a mute ex-department store dummy standing inside a dusty glass display cabinet, dressed in a 1940s school uniform and topped with a straw sun hat to shade the dim half-light of a solitary naked bulb. The uniformed dummy is supposed to awaken warm nostalgia in visitors; but it manages only to look like a cadaver, or a mannequin in a police missing persons investigation. Shiver. Distant laughter and the thump of ball games at a distance, and then a bell leading to a mid-afternoon silence broken by the rattly keyboard, ...

I borrowed a hardback copy of Picnic at Hanging Rock from Essendon library in the middle of winter in 1972. Then officially the Moonee Valley Regional Library Service, the library is known today as the Sam Merrifield library, making it sound like a collection of resources for Tolkien enthusiasts. At the time, Picnic at Hanging Rock was an obscure novelette by Joan Lindsay, who wrote no other fiction, even prefacing her 1967 book with a note suggesting it was based on real events. For a book of little note, its atmosphere was compelling. It was creepy. It verged on horror. Bad things happened. A sense of evil was knotted into the beauty of every interior and exterior scene. The sad mansion in the country, built on gold money, and abandoned. The garden under blazing sunshine. The brooding mountain. Appleyard College was already, in the year nineteen hundred, an architectural anachronism in the Australian bush – a hopeless misfit in time and place. The clumsy two-storey mansion was on...

Booktopia, the online bookstore, has a page on its website headed: "WHAT OUR CUSTOMER'S ARE SAYING". OK, that’s just carping. It could have been worse, like We Sell Book’s, greengrocer-style. Further down that page, Booktopia asks: Booktopia or Amazon? Taking on the 800 pound gorilla. Well somebody had to do it! Our goal is to be a legitimate alternative to Amazon. Booktopia’s David is not just taking on Goliath’s might. It is also taking on Goliath’s book reviews. Let’s take two examples. Of Raymond Chandler’s Playback , Booktopia summarises: Marlowe is hired by an influential lawyer he's never herd of to tail a gorgeous redhead, but decides he prefers to help out the redhead. She's been acquitted of her alcoholic husband's murder, but her father-in-law prefers not to take the court's word for it. " Chandler wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence: " -- Ross Macdonald Amazon...

We don't roast all that much, certainly not as much as our parents did. Sometimes can't seem to get it just right. The vegetables, I mean. I recall my mother's baked potatoes having crisp golden brown outer shells around steaming flesh with the texture of butter. Your knife fell through them after piercing the crust. They were so tasty you didn’t need gravy. She also roasted pumpkin and it always partially caramelised to a sweet unctuous black-crusted deep orange block that you could bulldoze through the gravy on the end of your fork, leaving clean white porcelain underneath like a snowploughed road. Everything had a faint minty tang lurking about the taste perimeter, like mountains on a summer breeze. That came from the mint that grew like a bushfire in the backyard. A few leaves chopped in a jug of boiling water with a glug of brown vinegar and a little sugar. Someone mentioned on radio yesterday – it might have been Adrian Richardson of La Luna restaurant – that the ...

And now – just as at this time last year (scroll down) – we can’t walk on the grass again, because of the consistent rain, now the highest for fourteen or fifteen years. But now there’s something else. Now, the lawn is talking. You can hear it at night if you creep outside in the cold air and lower your head to the ground. A thousand faint trickling noises. It’s not in one spot; it comes from the whole lawn. Trickling busily, like water in an underground stream. It’s not water sinking into the lawn, because it might not have rained for a day or two. That second last sentence might be the answer. This house sits on the banks of a tributary to the Merri Creek, on a north-sloping block that also falls away to the east. It seems we might also be over the top of an old sub-tributary, flowing south-north. Evidence? The lawn on this block never died during the drought. Green as ... well, green as grass throughout the entire drought, as if it were tapping a subterranean water source. Pe...

(For yesterday's 35th anniversary.) Has anyone ever heard 'I Met Her Today' played on radio? I haven't. This Roberston/Blair song was recorded by Elvis Presley in 1961, first released in 1965, and released again on the 1973 Separate Ways album. It reveals Presley's astounding vocal range, and perfect diction, delivery and control. Where is the centre of gravity? On these anniversaries you hear all the King of Rock and Roll cliches, and you hear the vocal mannerisms satirised; but beneath it all is the sheer unlaboured fluidity of Presley's voice - an infinite range that, when paired with a song that reminds you of the potential for human emotion to take you infinitely high or low, suggests some other power. It's nothing new. People have always described some voices as angelic. Meaning not just sweet, but opening a window on another world. This insignificant song talks about the joy that comes inexplicably out of despair. Like that window that sudden...

"It's in with double ovens and out with dated laminate ... ," began the article about the Herald Sun Home Show in yesterday's paper (not online). " ... it's more a case of two ovens are better than one when it comes to cooking dinner and dessert at the same time." The item went on to talk about 'whiz-bang' coffee machines and water coolers. Go ahead. Plug them in! Then: "There is also a big push towards more energy-efficient homes in a bid to cut power bills and help the environment ... ." Maybe they carbon neutralise their dinner parties by leaving the lights off, or not having any background music. Or requesting the guests to walk home.

What’s your favourite kind of store? Fashion, shoes, homewares? Books, antiques, op-shops? Hobbies, crafts, textiles? Food? Is everything covered in that lot? No. My favourite shop is ... Officeworks. I don’t know who has the Officeworks account, but they should bring back the old McEwens jingle, McEwens means a million things . (Do advertising jingles revert to the public domain when a company goes out of business; or after 50 years, like music?) It’s not just that Officeworks has a million things, it’s that they are interesting. Hardware stores have hammers, nails and planks of wood. These are all important items, but they are just not as fascinating as stationery. Bunnings customers are always in a hurry, and frowning. It is impossible to frown when you fondle a Parker fountain pen, and you can’t fondle anything in a hurry. Remember those Oxford mathematical instrument sets in old-fashioned tins? They still exist on Officeworks shelves. For a ridiculous (in the good sense) $6....

What brought this on was not so much a dredge through the playground of childhood memory, so much as the reality flying past me. The children have a large plastic box filled with pencils, probably two hundred or so. The pencils are of all colours and lengths and conditions and brands. The collection has been augmented by several sets given as gifts to them over the last few years, but the collection's backbone is the remains of a 72-pack Tracy once owned. I suppose she still does, in trust. The youngest child often gets the pencils out by the simple expedient of upending the box on the floor. This way you get to see them in their scattered glory, and pick one that catches your eye without having to riffle through dozens. This is brutally simple childhood logic. Someone wrote a book about it once. They lose this logic over the years. While William and Thomas are quite good artists, Thomas has found another purpose for the pencils. Alexandra has an extensive collection of hair ...

For about the last ten years, radio ads have endlessly urged people to buy rainwater tanks "because of the lack of rain". Now there's an ad on air that says, without any sense of irony: "With all the rain, now is a great time to buy a water tank!"

It wasn't in a book. One of the girls in Grade Three, Suzanna Arrowsmith, performed Vespers by A. A. Milne in front of the class, but I thought it was over the top. Sanctimonious little critic I was. Suzanne wanted to be an actress. She had the looks. The poetry was in a box; the names of the colours, each numbered, in a box of Derwent pencils. The 24-pencil set was a coloured landscape that spoke of dark valleys and lake-laced plains of vivid greens, and seas that swirled grey and blue. Emerald Green was the land of our forefathers; Raw Umber was the earth beneath; Blue Grey was the sky above and Rose Pink was the blush in Colleen’s cheeks. Ivory Black (just one of Derwent's blacks) was the frozen road or your father’s drink; Madder Carmine was a red flash somewhere between those two notorious actresses, Scarlet and Crimson Lake. Juniper Green was the colour of a sage leaf that flavoured mother’s stew. Jade Green, French Grey and Naples Yellow were the overseas holidays...

Oyster blade is overlooked. It is already cheap but is often marked down because nobody buys it. Don't people make stews any more? (And why does the spell check underline squiggle thing want me to join 'any' and 'more' as one word? They are not.) Here's one recipe that can turn a cheap cut of meat into something special: In a heavy pan – I use a heavy cast iron skillet that retains heat – cook a large chopped onion in olive oil. Remove when done and in the same pan, brown the meat, cut into large cubes, in more olive oil. Give it a few shakes of black pepper and one or two of salt. Then sprinkle the meat, while turning, with flour so that the meat is coated. Place meat and onions in a casserole. Cut two medium carrots into rounds. Trim a dozen button mushrooms. Chop a stick of celery into half-inch diagonals. Put these vegetables into the heavy pan, cover it and let them sweat in the pan's retained heat for a few minutes over a very low flame so that t...

I heard this song on the freeway in the car, and everyone knows that the best place to hear a song is on a freeway in a car. It's nothing to do with the freeway or the car; but rather because you are captive and have nothing to think about except the distant horizon and the killer lilt in her voice. Talk about fall. It was one of those interview programns on ABC; Mairi Nicolson talking to Christine Brewer, and they were playing her favourites. I had the children in the car, and they fell silent as the song that sounds like it was written hundreds of years ago floated out of the speakers. OK, it helped that I turned up the volume. The song was sung by a voice that sounded like five angels. She was his sunshine She was his moon and morning star It's the kind of song that makes you turn the radio off at the end, so you don't lose it from your mind. We had arrived anyway. That open zoo near Werribee where they drive you around in a safari bus to look at rhinos and oryx a...

Yes. For lunch on a cold day at the tail end of a wet July when you want something warm but light, tasty but easy, ... oh, (note to self) shut up and get on with the recipe. OK. Boil three large stalks of broccoli - last few inches of stem removed - with one finely chopped onion, a grated carrot, a scored clove of garlic, a six-inch stick of celery scored across its backbone, a scattering of dried coriander leaves, a pinch of chili powder, a few cumin seeds, and a dash of salt and pepper. (You can saute the onion first, but as a lunch recipe, I just throw everything in together. It's also lower in fat that way, if you're interested in that kind of thing.) When broccoli is done, get your propeller and puree the whole thing. The carrot will 'disappear'. Back on the flame, add half a cup of full cream milk, fold through, and serve with a spoonful of yogurt or sour cream and some chopped flat-leaf parsley. And grilled cheese on toast on the side. And a steaming mug of t...

It was about four years ago. A friend and I were looking through some old photographs when we turned up an old black and white one of me on my 21st birthday. “Look at the hair!” the friend exclaimed, a little too jauntily, I thought. “You’ll never grow it that long again!” he added. It was almost shoulder length. That’s how it was in 1978. Nothing out of the ordinary then, like Yalumba Carte dÓr riesling and the VB Commodore. “Yes, I could,” I returned. “But you won’t,” he insisted. “I bet you a thousand you won’t ever have hair that long again. You couldn’t possibly.” I took him up. He gave me five years. I did it in four. It was longer than 1978. $1000, please. Last Friday night I went to one of those new haircut places in Elizabeth Street. There are several of them competing in one block, and there is no waiting. They service the student population that has boomed in the area. “How short?” she asked. They used to call it short back and sides but the jargon now goes in number...

This is complicated. So let’s start at the start. Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, there was a lion park way out west. It was near Bacchus Marsh, on a large hill on the north side of the Western Highway. It was not a very good lion park. In fact, it was eventually closed down. Now there is no sign it ever existed. But Tracy knows where it was. We drive on the Western Highway a few times a year, and when we drop down into the Marsh valley on the shady side of that hill, Tracy gives a kind of shudder, almost imperceptible, like a facial tic. She eventually told me the story. She had been taken to the lion park as a five year old, and has been unable to erase the memory ever since. It was the middle of a very long hot summer, and the temperature that day could have been 42 degrees Celsius, except we didn't have Celsius then, so it was probably a far more impressive 100-plus Fahrenheit. Tracy’s family lived in Dandenong in those days; and there were no freeways. The mar...

Fenugreek is sweet, aromatic, savoury, enchanting, sublime, obvious and subtle. It is a herb, a spice and a vegetable. It does not come from Greece. Fenugreek is my flavour of the month. Chickpeas and corn with sour cream and fenugreek. Too easy to be serious. Until you taste it. Take a tin each of chick peas (or cook your own) and corn. Drain most of the fluids and gently warm the beige orbs and yellow grains in a pan. Add a teaspoon of fenugreek powder, a dash of salt and a pinch of white pepper. Then stir through a good tablespoon or two of sour cream. This humble dish is a taste sensation. Serve as a side dish topped with a sprig of coriander at a barbecue and the sausages will go cold, abandoned. Because the dish is so unassuming, it would probably be ignored if not for its seductive aroma redolent of ... ... I don't know. Fenugreek is available along Sydney Road at any number of delis and grocery shops. Some stock the leaves, frozen, ready to be cooked into a fres...

School holidays were once in May, when the odd sunny day could make the beach just possible. We spent many of these holidays at Inverloch where we'd venture to the beach in sensible day clothes but inevitably end up in the water with wet jeans, jumpers, shoes, etc. These days the holiday fortnight is in deepest darkest winter. Where to go, what to do? Who knows. We'll just set off.

William turned seven on Saturday. Here he is with his brand new tin reproduction of Donald Campbell's Bluebird, powered by wind-up friction engine.

Yes, it is cold today. The chill north wind is blowing across the Australian alps and you can practically smell the snow. But today is the day: the winter solstice. For some reason it varies between 20-22 June and this year it is today. Roll on summer. It's all downhill from here. Last night, dinner was simple and you'ce probably heard it all before. What came after was less common. Salmon with linguine. Linguine in the pot. A large square salmon fillet cubed into bite-size pieces and poached gently in a little white wine and a squeeze of orange juice. Just until done. Then the fluid reduced with the addition of a little cream, perhaps a tablespoonful, and poured over the salmon cubes on the linguine. Simple. Nothing else needed. Maybe a few springs of parsley, just for decoration. Then came the rumble. It was only a tremor, of course. The whole plate shakes, like the skin of a drum. They only break at the edge, and I don't think we're on an edge. Of course, sha...

One day I'm cutting energy bills to shreds; then I'm running the oven for seven hours. Leg of pork, bone in, from the butcher. Slashed the skin, studded it with garlic, rubbed it with oil and salt, into a low oven for seven hours, the first twenty minutes on high. * The children are eating apples like there's no tomorrow. They leave them half eaten. So the uneaten parts are peeled and chopped and boiled and drained and pureed. There's your sauce. Two onions - one white; the other red. Chopped finely, cooked gently in a little oil and white wine and a clove of garlic in a covered pan until soft and translucent. Generous salt and pepper. * Switch on the news: left-leaning inner urban newspaper saved by a rich West Australian female miner. Some ironies are beautiful in their completeness. * Now it's hours later. Baked leg out to rest under foil; skin off, skin back in oven with a dash of soy and a little honey, left to almost crisp. Roast pork served ...

They called it sticker shock in the 1990s recession–or was it the 1980s?–referring to overnight rises on price stickers shocking shoppers. We are about to experience bill shock. I could call it electric shock, but that might be a little dramatic. I anticipated this some time ago, well before any mention of a carbon tax. In fact, we have to go right back to 2005, after I bought this house . When I first inspected the house, a 1948 weatherboard bungalow, its operational economy was apparent. Today you’d say the house had ‘green credentials’ or was ‘eco-friendly’; but it simply had very few lights and no built-in appliances. Frugality was written all over it. It was a sale by the estate of the original owner; possibly someone who grew up in the shadows of the 1930s depression. There was a single gas heater in the lounge room and the rest of the house was unheated; there was no air-conditioning, no dishwasher, no exhaust fan in the bathroom (but an enormous sash window that, raised a...

Lamb shanks were a winter staple when I was growing up. When walking home from school on cold winter afternoons, I came to love the soupy redolence of lamb, carrot, celery, onion and barley rolling across the suburb like an aromatic fog. Everyone made lamb shank soup! There was nothing like that smell. * Six days to the winter solstice, so I’ve dragged this recipe out of the archive. Right now we need something robust, homely, and crammed with flavour. Lamb, rosemary, and a bottle of red. (Important note: the bottle of red wine in the title is an ingredient, so you’ll need to buy two if you plan to actually drink some.) Rosemary comes to the fore in this highly aromatic dish that will blanket the neighbourhood with tantalising aromas of lamb braising in red wine with herbs and garlic. (Is garlic also a herb?) In a plastic bag, dust six lamb shanks with a tablespoon of flour and salt and pepper. Brown the seasoned shanks in olive oil in a large heavy pot in batches. Remov...

Write about food for money? Beyond a few observations, food is food. Its nature determines that over-analysis is not natural, like chewing a mouthful eighty times. Food is for eating, not analysing; not for very long anyway. Food writing has to be sleight of hand. You have to write about something else and food has to just be there, along for the ride, without getting in the way. Food columnists go in and out of fashion. Eventually they pall. Jeremy Clarkson never palls, even though his writing is as formulaic as it gets, because his subject is motoring. But because the subject is food and the medium is their words, food writers’ pet phrases turn stale, like bread. It is something to do with the imaginative right and logical left brain, and hunger and desire, and what happens to your brain - or your stomach - when you read about food, and having the ability to go out and buy a burger right now; while you can’t go out and buy a Bentley right now. I don’t know. It is fashionable to...

I just closed my L***edIn account. I'm not even sure why I was on it in the first place . I can't even bring myself to type its whole name in case a bunch of Russian hackers close in on my blog. The Russians are coming! Does anyone see the irony of this? In the early 1960s, the nuns warned us about the Red menace; and there was a grain of truth in it, because my school had one of Melbourne's highest proportions of eastern European immigrants (the Polish and Ukrainian girls had the most beautiful skin and eyes and ringleted blond hair I had ever seen) whose Catholic parents had fled Stalin in the 1950s. Then the Russians weren't coming any more and anyone who had been afraid of the Red menace became the butt of liberal jokes. Now they're coming again! Actually, it would be quite amusing - in a dark way - if Russian hackers closed down the whole internet and we went back to posting letters and writing in diaries.

The city was bleak at 6.30 p.m. I walked diagonally across Flagstaff Gardens from King Street towards the market, in softly falling rain. The paths were dull yellow and slippery with wet fallen leaves. It had been windy and the leaf carpet rolled out onto William Street. I waited at the tram stop for the 55. Out of the darkness lit by pixillated orange, a giant mechanical monster emerged and ground its way slowly along the track heading towards the city. It was the leaf-eating machine that patrols the grid in winter, removing leaf mush from the inset tracks. The 55 came along and we sailed along William and into Flemington Road and then up into the blackness of Royal Park and behind the zoo. Is this the best tram ride in Melbourne? I like the part where the tram slams around the sharp turn under the rail bridge and cuts through the golf course. I was looking forward to dinner: home-made kebabs. * Question: do you eat bread that is older than a day? My routine is eat bread on day ...

I was 'visiting' Facebook (do people 'visit' books in the library? of course not - ridiculous) and it suggested - or even commanded, if the imperative mood is what Facebook intended - that I " Find friends from different parts of your life. " Among the list of 'friends' Facebook suggested I 'find' from different 'parts' of my life was my sister. I don't need to find my sister. I know where she is already. * A few weeks ago Facebook listed on the stock exchange after ridiculous valuations fuelled by near-hysteria. It was a bad idea to invest, but many thought it was a good one. That misapprehension lasted what, two weeks? Maybe some still think it's a good idea. We saw this twelve years ago, but they never learn. "It's not the same," everyone said, "The dotcom boom was different." I wasn't talking about the boom part, I said. They're always different, like tulips. But how they turn out is...

Risotto doesn’t usually figure in the quick and easy recipe pantheon, but it is a frequent solution here. Preparation is minimal, and it lets you do other things while you are cooking; such as opening the mail, reading, drinking, getting changed ... you get the idea. Here’s my risotto timeline when I get home late, but still want to eat well without having to stand at the stove or preparation board for very long: Risotto with zucchini and chorizo. 1. Walk in from the cold. Place keys and wallet on fridge. Fill kettle and turn it on. Peel and chop one onion. Peel and score one garlic clove. Toss both into a pot with glug of olive oil. Light stove. Elapsed time, 1 minute 20 seconds. 2. Place one chicken stock cube (I use Massel) into glass jug. Fill with boiled water. Stir. Pour rice into warm oil in pot. Stir. Elapsed time, 4 minutes. 3. Take bottle of white wine from fridge, tip a good glugful into rice, stir. Elapsed time, 4 minutes 30 seconds. 4. Pour stock into rice. St...