What I cooked last night.

"You can't umpire this sport and not make errors," Hayden Kennedy says. "It's an impossibility. You've just got to limit the damage." Well, we'll see on Friday. I'll be throwing the ball up for the grade sixers in their interschool match. Until now I've been running the boundary and you see plenty of infringements the central umpire doesn't, because he's usually behind the pack of twenty 10-year-olds jumping on each other. It might be easier in the middle. I ran kilometres on the boundary on Sunday morning because the northerly sweeping down Greenvale oval No. 4 kept blowing the ball into the paddock behind. Spectator attempts to boot the ball back to the middle usually got blown straight back again. Clean bump and pick-up Bounce Drop punt (Pictures are from a previous game at Keilor Park second oval complete with tractor ruts.)

Soon, the world will run out of passwords . Don't say I didn't warn you four years ago.

Tim Blair beat me to George Hamilton IV by a few hours, but I beat him to Jimmy Elledge . By three years.

People keep throwing bird's eye chilis at me. When we stayed a couple of nights at the Kingswood Motel in Tocumwal a month or so ago, the owner pointed out her herb garden near the pool and barbecue area and invited me to sample the chilis. That night I did. It was a hot evening and we ate outside as the sun went down. I grilled steaks and made a potato salad. I flattened the chilis on the grill to char them and then smeared them over the grilled steaks. Then I ate a couple whole. I saw stars. Then, back home, a neighbour gave me a whole bag of bird's eyes from her front garden. That was a few weeks ago. I've got through about half. The reason, of course, is that the chili plants are very popular right now as an ornamental planting in pots and garden beds. And they are prolific. You can't eat enough of the chilis to keep up. You have to give them away, like grapefruit. The trick with chili is to combine it with other flavours. You can't hide the heat, but yo...

From today's paper : SHOPPERS baulking at the cost of beef are scrambling for eggs and stretching supplies. Customers have been confronted with depleted egg sections at some supermarkets. A notice advised eggs were in short supply "due to unexpected events in the industry". "People searching for cheaper alternative proteins are recognising the value of eggs," Egg Farmers Aus­tralia spokesman John Coward said. "A kilo of eggs is as low as $4. A kilo of popular steak is $20-$35. They can replace a beef dinner with a frittata." When it comes to "unexpected egg events", a frittata sounds a bit of a letdown compared to, for example, a 400g porterhouse, chargrilled to perfection, still pink in the middle and drowning in pepper sauce. The following is a much more robust alternative to the ubiquitous - and somewhat pretentious - frittata, if steak is off and eggs are on. Egg and bacon pie. Grease a glass or enamel pie dish and line it with a s...