What I Cooked Last Night

The fill-in announcer on RRR just now (The Cave, formerly the Skullcave) was discussing his relationship with disco, which was fractious.  Apart from some early tentative crossover hits, disco eventually veered far from its soul-funk roots and descended into a musical hellhole from which it never recovered, leading to desperate attempts at new musical directions, such as the robotic new romantics using drum machines and synthesisers instead of  'instruments'.  One year in the mid-1970s disco collided with Christmas, resulting in a disco-fied Joy To the World strung out into a zombie-like metronomic medley with everything from Silent Night to White Christmas. It was the era of prawn cocktails, avocado vinaigrette, vol au vents and Coolabah moselle at the table; with guests wearing flared suits and six-inch ties - so the whole shooting match had a kind of balanced bad taste flavour about it. Disco passed but some of the world’s worst music continues to be reserved espe...

Eggplant - known in England and other parts as the more evocative aubergine - is an underused vegetable, unless you are Lebanese or Turkish and then you probably have it coming out your ears. No wonder: eggplant is a marvellous vegetable/fruit/berry (used as a vegetable, looks like a fruit, is botanically a berry). This distant relative of the tomato, chilli pepper, potato and tobacco (eat twenty eggplants for breakfast and forgo your morning cigarette) has a chameleonic ability to adapt to other flavours and ingredients, absorbing their flavours and goodness. It was a late night. I had been to a committee meeting; long, but not as long as they used to be. The new president/chairman had taken over and had made good on his vow - and my insistent proposal - to cut meeting times to ninety minutes, if not seventy-five. For years they had on occasion blown out to midnight, from an eight p.m. start. They had been occasions for crusted-on committee hogs to have proxy social lives, monthly pl...

It was a warm day, two in the afternoon. Slightly overcast. Southerly breeze. I drove southwest out of Melbourne, but not too far out. I took the four-lane Geelong freeway to the C114 turnoff and instead of swinging in a big right arc back across the freeway to Lara like most of the traffic, I took a left turn down the long lonely road towards the coast.  After a while, it became one lane for both directions so that you have to pull over when a vehicle comes from the other direction. Then the blacktop ended altogether, and the car crunched along gravel towards a leftwards sweep. A sign warned 'No passing on bridge' and the road narrowed even more. I rumbled over the bridge, swung back to the right, and the track stopped dead a few hundred yards farther along in a big careless patch of bitumen under a jumble of fishing boats and trailers. A slipway disappeared under a seaweedy stretch of water probably five miles across to a peninsula in the distance. Small semi-visible figures ...

 At long last, after several lockdown-caused false starts,  The Moonee Ponds Club: Celebrating 125 Years  was launched on 6 December at the Club's premises at 622 Mount Alexander Road, Moonee Ponds.  3AW's Pub of the Week raconteur/gastronome/comedian/CouldbeenChampion/Moonee Ponds notable Tony Leonard emceed the launch of the iconic club with a laugh-generating off-the-cuff ramble ranging over his upbringing in neighbouring Footscray, the price of Ben Ean moselle in the 1980s and a snub of his alma mater: he once launched a book for Xavier College - an Eastern suburbs school for social-climbing Catholics - in which the attendees descended on the book table, grabbed copies and immediately turned to the index to find out how many 'mentions' they had. (I had been discussing with him prior to the launch that very reason why we had strategically decided not to include an index in my book.) Tony Leonard even kindly offered to purchase a copy of the book, so impressed was ...

It was the biggest short-lived panic of all time. I pointedly don't listen to morning radio; particularly the crybaby shock jock, the oracle of timid men, the un-pied piper of the craven, the timid choirmaster of catastrophists. But there he was, or at least his voice, coming out of a radio perched behind the counter of some shop I'd had to visit, talking up the chances of catastrophe via a new virus mutation, and frightening what life was left in his fabric-masked listeners cowering behind the ironed curtains of their fortress homes. It was just after 9am, Monday morning. I waited. The shop was busy. Now the voice on the shelf behind the counter, treble unaccountably amplified so you could hear every sibilant letter, had one of those pop psychologists on air, who was explaining in carefully enunciated syllables the importance of, when there is bad news, breathing slowly, not jumping to catastrophic conclusions, and being thankful for what you had. Small mercies in bad times. B...

No, not a mid-seventies psychedelic swirlfest, or a 1990s retro tribute to that era. This seven-minute sparse-lyriced, choral-backed musical rollercoaster ride was released last month. Don't believe anyone who says there's no good music any more. 'Miracle Drum' by Even from El Reno Music, Melbourne 2021.

Inverted commas? Yes: the definition is unclear. Pasticcio literally translated is a mess, although the Italians use it as the name of a dish in which ingredients are combined and baked. A combination of vegetables - as the following recipe is - separated by pasta sheets would be what we call a lasagne. But because the word lasagne refers specifically to the pasta sheets, the dish is a mess, just like this paragraph. Starting from the bottom I placed onion rings in the base of the casserole with a scored clove of garlic and a splash of olive oil. (Some recipes fry the onions first but this worked fine.) Then I added layers of very finely sliced potato; not so finely sliced pumpkin; pre-salted, rinsed and grilled sliced eggplant; sliced red capsicum; and sliced zucchini. I interspersed each of these with enough basil-infused tomato purée to coat the layers. When three-quarters up to the top of the dish, I tipped in half a cup of chicken stock to keep it all moist and flavoursome, and a ...

Of course, the horse had never raced over that distance. But things were going well. Incentivise had moved effortlessly from third to second to leader at one thousand out. The race was there to be won.  But that morning, James McDonald who was to ride Verry Elleegant in the Cup wrote in the Herald Sun: 'Incentivise still has to run two miles ... until they do it, you just never know. ... knowing Verry Elleegant will run (the distance) is huge. ... The first 200m to 400m is ... important for Verry Elleegant. I'm going to want to find a spot and switch her off. Also, from the 1000m to the home turn. That's where I need to find the right horse or horses to tow me into the race.' After lumbering out of barrier eighteen, Verry Elleegant switched off three back, rode a few horses around a few turns, rode a few more along the straights, and then sat on Spanish Mission to the home turn. Then McDonald switched her on again. As astounding as that turn of speed seemed, equally bre...

Today's Melbourne Cup will see Incentivise start as the shortest-priced favourite since Phar Lap: in 1930.  Ben Dorries in the Herald Sun writes: 'During the Great Depression, Phar Lap raised the spirits of a nation ... helped uplift many Australians in dire financial straits, some struggling to put food on the table.' Coming out of lockdown (in name only; a raft of restrictions apply, vaccination apartheid has created the New Untouchables, and the Victorian government has crowned itself with vast new powers of arrest and detention ad infinitum, North Korea-style), Dorries suggests Incentivise is channelling Phar Lap (or more correctly the punters are) and that '(while) there will never be another Phar Lap ... Incentivise is hauling the nation along with him on a similar magical mystery journey ...'. Incentivise hasn't won yet. The race is still two hours away. 10,000 people were 'allowed' to attend Flemington today. Some bureaucrat pulled the figure out...

Coincidentally, the last five foster greyhounds have been black (in order, Barney, Pete, Bruce, Edward and Caspar, shown above). And six of the last seven ( Lou ). They get to go on long walks. I'm a keen rambler. People - neighbours, locals - nod, acquaintance-like. Now, these black dogs might have had variations; white toe-tips, or a slightly larger or smaller chest patch, or floppier ears; but these details are generally not significant enough for the average dog-spotter to notice. So they think they are all the same dog. But the five black greyhounds were different sizes. Some greyhounds can be confused with whippets, while some are the Clydesdales of the greyhound world. One chatty passer-by insisted one of my greyhounds - I think it was Bruce - had grown a couple of inches in a month.

Fahrenheit 451 is a 1950s science fiction novel of the type often described as 'dystopian', a previously little-known word that now regularly peppers letters to the editors of Australian newspapers. George Orwell is the generic default author for big-brother scenarios, but Ray Bradbury comes close. Fahrenheit 451's firemen, public servants, burn books - and their owners if they refuse to get out of the way. Books are a hindrance to authoritarian governments. The firemen have turned to book- and people-burning because houses no longer burn in the year 2145: there are no fires to put out. Equally, Australia is the healthiest country in the world. We are so fit, the health bureaucrats will do anything to stop people from getting sick: including locking them up. That is the long and short of it. No ifs, no buts. As one letter writer, Elizabeth Filby of Bacchus Marsh (eschewing the word 'dystopian' for once), quipped: 'Perhaps we should all stay home until no-one ev...

In a lead item in Saturday's Herald Sun on the never-ending home imprisonment of Victorians, Federal treasurer Josh Frydenberg warns of its effect on young people, quoting Melbourne University paediatrician and adolescent health expert Professor Fiona Russell: "We cannot ... keep ... locking them down all the time. ... children are not resilient. The most disadvantaged children and families ... are worst affected." Meanwhile Small Business Australia's Bill Lang despairs of the devastation the ongoing nightmare has wrought: " ... we are talking sbout the livelihoods of tens of thousands of small business owners and the hundreds of thousands of people they employ ... There is a point when the the health bureaucrats who have financially crippled this state and paid no heed to the mental health of their policy of continuous ... lockdown ... need to be moved to the back of the room - and the interests of those who have been asked to carry incredible financial and emot...

That sapling mentioned in the previous post had grown and grown and ended up decades later as a jasmine-encrusted mature, and then dead, tree. The 'tree people' arrived that afternoon with their tree-munching machine, a thing I cannot look at without thinking of that scene from a movie, can't remember the title, in which they feed the bad guy into it. Of course, the director or scriptwriter or art director or whoever decides these things had it situated in snow, to accentuate the bloody mess that came out the other end. They shored up the trunk, slashed the jasmine cables, and got the chainsaw to work. It had plenty of kickback on the flint-like dead trunk but after an hour or so they had the job done. The garden already looked lighter, sunnier. And the clothesline was still standing. I went inside the house and told her it was safe to go outside. She was reliving history again. You could go in there with a dictaphone and come out with a book. 1942. She is an Intermediate s...

Let's just back track a few decades on that garden scene. The jungle was an ordered garden then; something out of Brunnings Australian Garden Guide: garden beds along the fencelines, shrubs at the rear, and annuals in front nodding their flowerheads at their cousins across squares and arcs of lawn separated by prim neat pathways. Also, three fruit trees in the lawn, and two outbuildings painted in glistening Taubman's Ship Grey gloss. We worked bucolic Saturday afternoons edging, pruning, raking by autumn, and watering by summer, while the sun dragged deep-etched shadows across the flat geometric lawns from west to east, angling farther south in winter, a mere sliver in the roiling height of summer when the heat slammed down from straight above. One year my mother planted a sapling at the west end of the garden. It will have purple flowers, she said. I lived in one of the small outbuildings just about all of two summers. Oppressive heat was relieved by a sliding air-hatch in th...

I returned the next morning. She'd been up early. She had not listened to my advice. She was not in the house. Surely not. I pushed open the back door, stepped down the ramp and passed the old vine-covered garage and the long-abandoned art studio. There was something moving in the deeply shadowed patch under the spread of the downed canopy that now hung dangerously. The moving thing was her, under the clothesline, pegging out smalls in the darkness of a virtual jungle, a sixty-foot trunk looming over the top like the fuselage of a crashed airliner. I drew her out gingerly, like a soldier carrying an injured buddy out of a minefield. When we were back in clear sunlight I asked her if she'd forgotten what I'd told her last night. Oh, no , she said. But it's perfectly safe , she added. It would have come down by now. Anyway, it's a good drying morning. I trundled her and her walker inside and told her not to come out again. The tree had been some African type; purple ...

Front page story, The Australian, 5/10/21: ‘... the undercurrent is that Perrotet is such a conservative Catholic - witness his six children - that he should not lead the State ...’. The ‘undercurrent’ is the Twitter sewer from which the journalist, Stephen Rice, has aggregated a pot of swirling leftist hatred; a witches’ brew of bile.  One can only imagine what the New South Wales premier’s children would think of being co-opted as evidence that disqualifies their father.

It was a late winter's evening, cold and dry with the faint smell of spring in the air. That would be the trees exuding some kind of pre-flower woodiness from their buds, waxing in the night air. The smell I had loved as a child, and was still here to welcome me at the old ancestral home. I had given my mother her evening pill cocktail; one of everything. I had warmed her milk and spooned honey into it and stirred it, and we had sat for a while and she swallowed her pills with the milk. No trouble there. Ninety-three and doesn't look a day over a hundred. Long grey hair (she never cut it), a sculptured face vaguely suggesting the beauty she once was, and old pale skin as smooth as paper. I left her snoozing on her old chair made more comfortable by about twenty cushions and pillows and a couple of old tartan rugs. Sheer luxury. Locking the back door, I noticed it was darker than it should have been at that time. I stared into the distance, down towards the end of the garden, pa...

I've made various countdown lists over the years on this weblog. About a decade ago, I counted down my top ten vegetables. Must have been a slow week at work. Number one was the onion . An unusual choice perhaps. But when regarding the question as 'what vegetable could you least do without' the onion moves into the box seat. The following recipe is an example, built on a foundation of four members of the onion family, and crowned by a fifth. This 'assembly' version of paella is good if you don't have one of those tractor-wheel size vessels large enough to house the whole thing while cooking, or a stove big enough to handle it. I started by frying a generous cup and a half of combined chopped leek, white onion, red ('Spanish') onion and garlic in peanut oil for about five minutes, placing this mixture into a second large pan when just translucent. Then I fried a large cubed chicken breast and a sliced chorizo sausage in the same pan, so that the meat took...

Don’t think this panic-stricken hysteria came out of the blue. The warning signs go back a long way. Many sage thinkers have written about a sudden decline in mass religious belief leading to a risk-averse society that believes that faith is blind. Au contraire, mes amis. Only hysteria is blind. Faith buys time. Hysteria buys nothing. Now it stalks the land turning otherwise intelligent people into zombie-like order-followers. Police throw innocent citizens to the ground; arrest pregnant women in their homes and wearing pyjamas on charges of incitement; fire rubber bullets at retreating mobs. Public health bureaucrats use hours-long press conferences fronted by obeisant media ingenues to announce in clipped tones through forests of microphones the daily infection numbers, a kind of numerology incantation with only the sacred smoke missing to complete the medieval picture. They may as well announce how many people have sneezed that day. This era will be seen in the future as the great...

The sun setting later at night is becoming a concern for lockdown-loving curfew zealots, whose statements are now regularly exceeding even the most wildly satirical excesses of the savagely incisive university comedy revues of the pre-PC 1980s. Example: Canadian (resident in Australia) health bureaucrat Nancy Baxter said (Herald Sun, 28/9), ‘ ... sunset really shouldn’t be setting the timing of the curfew. ... If it’s getting lighter later (sic), one would think there would be more movement. And the whole point of curfew is to reduce movement.’

The coffee machine was dripping its black magic into the cup. Vito was holding the stainless steel frothing jug. He pulled the lever, and I waited for the familiar throaty muffled roar of steam in milk. Instead, the floor shook. Vito's hand froze on the lever. The espresso glasses on top of the machine danced like crystal fairies. Ten eyes instinctively swung to the window.  Where do you look when an earth tremor strikes? There's nothing to see, unless you're really unlucky. There was also nothing to hear, but the shaking makes you think there is noise. There is only noise from damage, and where I was, there was no damage. Just a bunch of jangling coffee glasses. The five people in the cafe went outside. The five were two customers (one being me), and staff Vito, Katerina, and their father Sam (who is in his eighties and still makes the best coffee of all of them). People were looking at the sky. Wrong direction. Others were gazing in the direction of the tramline. Better g...

Saturday. The city's public transport system shuts down to thwart lockdown protestors. Earlier in the week the drawbridge comes up on Ballarat, population 100,000, when a covid-19 case is detected. Maybe two. Maybe four. The Australian Capital Territory, where Autralia's bureaucracy lives, is given a further four weeks detention (prefixed - as always - 'at least') in the face of a few dozen infections. Back to Melbourne: photographs of several ultra-orthodox residents of the Balaclava/East St Klda area are repeatedy - meaning across many days - published in newspapers and social media following reports of 'illegal' religious meetings. When the truly insane ban on children playing in playgrounds is reversed the obeisant press prints pictures of smiling adults and children jumping for joy at playgrounds - as if gifted with a privilege - instead of being white-hot angry at the sheer stupidity, cruelty and utter pointlessness of the ban. Today: s man flies into Dar...

That lazy afternoon, with Blue Juice dying on the radio towards one o'clock, the kitchen table had Sunday written all over it. The wreckage of someone's - or several persons' - late breakfast of maple-syruped pancakes lay almost buried under the outspread weekend newspapers. Yes, newspapers plural. At least three weekend newspapers find their way into this house. The death of the newspaper will not be on my head. I cleaned the table. I like cleaning it. It is a mid-twentieth century original, of smoke-patterned pale green chrome-edged Laminex, over a tubular stainless steel frame that cleverly curves down at each corner into twin chrome legs that stand on the polished timber floor in neat black rubber stoppers, like little socks. It is as quintessentially 1950s as an R-Type Bentley. (And as long-lasting. Every year I see Ikea tables thrown in disgust onto hard rubbish collections, pathetic legs snapped like twigs, and deep scratches in their faux-timber veneers.) I had pre...

Early Saturday afternoon, about one o'clock. The path led north, hemmed in by a cliff on one side and the creek on the other. Occasionally a ramp or stairway, cut into the hill, cascaded down from a street above and into the valley. Eucalypts scissored the oblique sunlight and I walked on through the flickering kinescope. From my house I had turned west to the corner, north uphill, and east again, to meet the path following the stream’s s-curves. It used to be an undefined dirt trail, then one year the council concreted it and painted a line down the middle with a pedestrian and cyclist symbol. Today - meaning literally today - it was a human superhighway carrying refugees from the torrid hatefulness of their own four walls, moving north and south like somnolent zombies. Floral-masked Brunswick and Coburg hipsters bearing takeaway coffees; family groups with prams and dogs and toddlers wobbling on first bicycles; old people making painful physical progress towards death; joggers, w...

Greater Dandenong Council Mayor Angela Long said (reported Herald Sun, 24 August) police tape had proved ‘futile’ in stopping children going to playgrounds. She will support removing the swings - literally out of the ground - and asking for increased police patrols. Dandenong is a migrant suburb with poor housing stock and a high percentage of units, flats and apartments with no play areas. Play-starved children craving recreation have no other options. Mayor Long said, ‘I’m supportive of taking swings down if it’s to save children’s lives.’ Next day, Dr Seamus Jones of East Geelong wrote (Herald Sun, 25 August), ‘Damaging the younger generations to protect ourselves is ...  immoral. ... heartless and selfish. ... one day (we can) look back at this time ... as the only nation that hid behind its children.’ Herald Sun front page headline, 28 August: Teen Toll: Top Doc Reveals Devastating Health Scars on our Young.

  ' ... but old dogs and children and watermelon wine'. - Tom T. Hall 1936-2021

2021, somewhere near Boston. Ben Turnbull lives in a big old house with a number of empty rooms and attics with creaking pipes. His wife is busy with committees. Ben Turnbull survived the Sino-American war. Many didn’t. This is the aftermath. The west coast is unreachable; wiped out. Entrepreneurs are making brave talk about reinhabiting China’s radioactive wastelands. Parts of New York lie in ruins. China's bombs didn't reach that far: Chinese Americans, sympathetic to China, were responsible. (This book - for it is a novel - was written four years before 2001.) Local thugs ransom Ben Turnbull for property protection. He pays. There are no police. Ben lapses in and out of time-warp consciousness; becoming at one point a monk in 793 Britain during a Viking attack on their territorially-valuable island during which the other monks are slaughtered. He sees the head monk depart along with the invaders. Traitor? No, when they pass a fence, he perceives the monk’s head is on a pike....

The cookbook must have dated from the 1970s, if not earlier; but I could not ascertain this, as the title page with publication details on the reverse had been torn out or lost somewhere along the way. But you can carbon-date a cookbook by the names of its recipes and, sometimes, its typography. Not to mention, of course, its rich heritage of photography which in the case of the 1970s featured chocolate brown glazed soup tureens, Byzantine-style green-coloured stem glassware, tapestry tablecloths and stained glass lamps casting a multi-hued glow over the chunky candle-laden refectory tables.  The book I had in my hands featured 'Apricot-Glazed Ham Steaks', 'Pork Roly Poly' and 'Chicken in a Pot' among its quaintly-named dishes. The book was one of those community efforts with each recipe contributed by an individual. One recipe was 'Virginian Chicken'. Why Virginian? Was it first cooked at Shiloh Ranch? Or featured in an early episode of the TV series? I...

The road led north out of town on a vast hard plain pointing straight towards Australia's dead heart. We had emerged onto this flat superhighwayish landscape out of a series of curving roads through gulch, valley, pass, fissure; the land fractures that yielded 1850s Bendigo gold, whose evidence still lines that city's main streets. I drove the B-roads via Heathcote and Axedale to avoid linear Bendigo's endless stoplights and because I prefer B-roads anyway. The houses along the northbound highway grew fewer, then the big industrial yards and warehouses muscled in, like in every other outer-suburban industrial wasteland in the world. A steel fabricator's warehouse, a wool-buyers' yard, a refrigeration works. Open fields, and then a lonely church, its sign recommending:  Let Jesus Carry the Burden 1 Peter 5-7, in three different typefaces. A larger sign on the next property, a farm machinery sale yard, proclaimed:  Kubota: This Is the Life, which was almost as spiri...

That clichéd Russian casserole dish from what, the 1950s? 1970s? had been in the oven for several hours the other day, using cubed gravy beef, rather than strips of whatever: fillet? scotch? rump?  Anyway, the whole thing is a sham. Onions, mushrooms and wine were not in an early Russian recipe. On the other hand, cubed beef - rather than strips to be sautéed - were. Who cares about genuine? In the 1960s they invented manufactured stroganoff mix, in a packet. They sold millions. Convenience food.  I had shaken the cubed beef in a sealed bag with enough flour to coat it and enough paprika to colour the flour. And salt. And pepper. Then I had sealed the beef in oil in an open pan, transferring it to a casserole with a scattering of marjoram, and then sautéing a couple of thinly sliced onions in the same pan with some halved button mushrooms, before removing them to the casserole. Then a good amount of white wine and beef stock had been sloshed into the pan to coax out the cooked...

There was a little sun as high morning swung into early afternoon. I sat at the kitchen table. The radio sat on the fridge, Off the Record playing the result of a station survey about the best songs ever recorded in Melbourne. There had been three opened rice paper packs in the bottom drawer. It's one of my pet hates, several of something all open at the same time. I had them on the table, along with chicken thigh fillets poached in garlic and a few drops of soy, capsicum, carrot, cooked rice noodles, beanshoots - and a jar of that Vietnamese dipping sauce that tastes like what a rollercoaster feels like to a teenager. A massive salt attack followed by a sugar plunge with a chilli chaser. I had hot water in a shallow bowl to soften up the rice paper, and a damp teatowel to roll them on. Brian Wise on RRR-FM played the predictable Daddy Cool, Spectrum and Skyhooks songs and then announced the number one, towards midday, as a controversial choice: From St Kilda to King's Cross , ...

That Top 100 was meant to demonstrate the sheer arbitrariness of list-making. An example: I deliberated over No. 2 before choosing the Aretha Franklin version of Lucky Old Sun over Ray Charles’. Why? I don't know. Something to do with that old novel title, the singer not the song Later I found as good a performance of Stardust as Nat King Coles’. Ultimately all of this is inexplicable human subjectivity and it changes day to day, like moods or seasons.

Last weekend's front page Covid story led off its third paragraph with: 'Friday marked another grim milestone ...' . Bodies piling up in the streets blocking the view of jaunty kangaroos bouncing along in the distance? Black-hatted cart drivers, medieval-style, yelling 'Bring out your dead'? No. The sentence continued: ' ... with 97 new cases recorded.' 97 Covid infections in New South Wales is another grim milestone? More than half of Australia - 14 million people - are currently under house arrest. No, wait. It has just gone 3 o'clock Tuesday. The following breaking news just hit the ticker (the radio speaker in my case): South Australia has recorded a new locally acquired case on Tuesday as the state is plunged into a full lockdown. One new case - later revised up to four - and the entire population of South Australia has been placed in lockdown. So add almost two million more people to the 14 million above. The South Australian premier, greedily pur...

Fusion or confusion? This melding of a cliched Italian staple with an English-style slow-cooked beef casserole results in my favourite winter dish ever . Take a kilogram of gravy beef (shin beef in Britain), cut it into 5cm pieces, flour and season it and brown it in olive oil - in batches - in a large pan. Set it aside in a big round casserole dish. Add a finely chopped onion to the vacated pan and stir until soft. Add a garlic clove and a sprig of fresh thyme and stir until aromatic. (Add more oil as necessary.) Add the beef back to the pan, along with a can of diced tomatoes, a cup of beef stock, half a cup of wine (red or white - I used white), and bring almost to the boil. Transfer to the casserole, place it in a low oven (150-160 celsius) and let it burble away quietly for three hours. (The gravy beef, laden with gelatine, will separate on prodding it with a roasting fork after the long slow cooking process.) When almost ready to serve, cook 250g of ravioli, which is about ha...

Saturday night, went down to Melbourne Kebab Station for some insta-grilled chicken and Adana wrapped in Turkish bread that floated through thin air like cotton wool it was so fresh. Folded all through with lettuce, tomato, fresh cut onion and squirts of garlic and chilli sauce for flavour and aroma overpower. The air is cold and the music is hot; the music of the perfect kebab. An extra loaf of Turkish bread right out of the oven, black seeds burning. Take it home and feast. Red wine. Saturday night.  Sunday morning. Leftovers. Magic Carpet Ride on the radio. The bread had been the size of a flat pillow, and there’s still over half left. Cut into small squares and make a dipping sludge of leftover potato mash welded with olive oil, a ground garlic clove, plenty of salt and pepper and some thick yogurt. Then out into the chill air with the basic picnic watching the kids play football, one eye on the steel sky.  Eight degrees. Wind. Garlic-swept bread. Heaven. Winter.

Prominent on the front of the Sanitarium brand peanut butter jar: Made in Australia since 1898. In small type on the back of the jar: Made in Australia from 0% Australian ingredients.

‘ ... sometimes it is necessary to protect the superfluous in order to preserve the necessary.' Given the level of cancellation currently swirling around the Western world, the US Supreme Court’s admonition last week was timely.

One of our two cars was stolen out of the driveway a week ago. It was an old Camry, but Toyotas never stop.  To replace it, I'd been to Ringwood on Friday and nearly bought an Avalon, and Williamstown the day before and nearly bought a Holden Viva, and prior to that I'd spent a day's due diligence on Carsales. I made a shortlist. On Saturday morning I took the freeway south. It was a nice morning, pale sun breaking through. It was the second day out of that fourth C19 shutdown thing, and Melbourne was catching up with itself on yet another groundhog freedom day. Off the Record's tunes were floating around inside the car, gold and shimmering notes bouncing off the windows in the winter freeway sun streaming through the glass as the car slipped past Toorak, Malvern East, and Chadstone. In between the music the RRR-FM announcer was interviewing Jerry Douglas, who was saying the studio - RCA's famous Studio B - in which the album was recorded could be heard in the music...

Google: there it is, waiting silently and patiently in your device, like an English butler, to tell you everything you want to know. In the old days, you would ask your wise grandmother. Now, she probably gets her information from the internet as well. Example: feeling unwell? Look up your symptoms, then go to the doctor and tell him what's wrong with you. Saves time. Then there's cooking. Everyone googles their dinner. The other night I made Cornish pasties. I had a bit of a look around online. Everyone was saying theirs was 'authentic', as if they had an aunt who had been married to a Cornish miner who liked carrying unwrapped food in his pocket to eat three hours later when he was two hundred feet underground digging up tin. The multitude of online recipes for Cornish pasties insisted variously on skirt, chuck or rib-eye steak; swede or turnip (apparently the same thing in some places); carrot; black or white pepper; potato diced or sliced; frozen peas; thyme; rosema...

Yes, of course, the ex-farm girl had killed, plucked and gutted the chickens, boning the meat and setting the giblets aside for soup, without batting an eye. The chickens had been purchased for that very purpose, but they’d been around long enough (for fattening up; not that a bantam gets very fat) to have earned names. There was more to the story. I've omitted some characters. There was another child at the small kitchen table. My grandfather's sister Mary had died, leaving a ten-year-old son to an unreliable father who turned him over to his mother-in-law. My grandfather took them both into his household, formally adopting the child. So his mother (my great-grandmother) is at the table as well, or more likely in the easy chair near the stove. Rearrangement of the single-fronted Edwardian terrace occurred. My grandfather flew around with a hammer and timber and cement sheeting, and Len and his cousin/adoptive brother Robert migrated to the new sleepout (translation: bungalow) ...

She was sitting in the sun, and her mind rolled back down the decades to the days, when war had ended, of repair and gladness and sadness and regrowth. The sun warmed her, and she told the story. Winny was named after Winston Churchill, and Dynon after the great North Melbourne captain and centreman. Winny and Dynon were small bantam hens. It was 1947. Postwar optimism was co-mingled with severe shortages in materials, building supplies, clothing and food. It was called austerity. Australians were packing food parcels and sending them off to Britain - great and wonderful Britain - source of our laws and our stoicism and our culture and our ... recipes. Len was twelve. He was my mother's younger brother. The bantam hens were his, and they lived in the back yard of the single-fronted terrace in Ascot Street, Ascot Vale, directly across from the racecourse, which had recently been turned over to public housing. Bantams can fly. It would have been easy for them to escape. Len restraine...

I’m no vegetarian; I just like eating them (vegetables, not vegetarians). The following salad - or perhaps it is a stew - is based on those small purple eggplants you find in Italian and Middle Eastern greengrocers, and builds on these with sweet-acid tomatoes, earthy pine nuts, and salty brined olives and capers. To make it, I cubed about 750g worth of purple eggplant, placed it in a colander, and sprinkled it with a good handful of salt for an hour, before rinsing it off and frying it in batches in olive oil. Then I drained the fried eggplant on paper towels. Meanwhile, I had fried a chopped onion in another pan and, when almost done, added a dozen pitted and chopped Sicilian green olives, a small handful of capers, a punnet of those mini tomatoes about the size of the olives, a cubed celery heart, and a big handful of pine nuts. I cooked all of this for five minutes or so, adding a little more oil. Then into the fragrant vegetable/nut mixture went the fried eggplant, followed by a t...

That list was torture. For every song there were ten others as good. Probably twenty. You can't squeeze them all in. Where were Roy Hamilton, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Al Green, Jim Morrison, Chuck Berry, Neil Young (‘Out on the Weekend’ was bumped for something else), and Willie (‘Blue Eyes Cryin' in the Rain’) Nelson? Where was Van Morrison? (His stunning mindscape ‘On Hyndford Street’ from Hymns to the Silence was in an early draft of the 100.)  Christ Almighty, WHERE WAS RAY CHARLES? AND JIMI HENDRIX? (I tossed a coin for No. 2 - 'Lucky Old Sun' - and Aretha Franklin's version beat Ray Charles'. And where were Randy ('One Day I'll Fly Away') Crawford, Nina Simone, Gladys Knight, Karen Carpenter, Ella Fitzgerald, Ketty ("Love Letters") Lester and Patsy Cline? The obvious top 100 habituees (Rolling Stones, Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Who and others) are on everyone else's, so they didn't need to be in my inconsequentia...

Happy 80th birthday, Robert Allen Zimmerman.

Orecchiette pasta are the shape of little ears. The logic in this is that each piece has a kink in it that catches any errant sauce; and it works best, as does most pasta, when the shapes of its accompaniments are similar. This recipe pairs the orecchiette with cherry tomatoes, capers, zucchini, and pine nuts.  Home-style orecchiette: recipe interruptus . Crush a garlic clove and warm it in half a cup of olive oil in a pan over low heat along with a sprinkling of dried marjoram and a small handful of pine nuts.  Dice a zucchini and add it, along with a punnet of halved cherry tomatoes and a couple of dozen desalted capers to the pan. Cook all this, gently stirring, for 15 minutes until the zucchini has absorbed the oil and garlic and marjoram flavours. Then cover it, turn off the stove and go shopping, wash the car, read a chapter of your book, or walk the dog. The flavour intensifies if you allow the flavours to mingle for a few hours.  I walked the dog, the latest in a ...

OK, that’s a hackneyed literary term but it had suited the weather.  That previous Saturday had been so warm that when I had peeled off the black armband on Saturday night it left a band of white, like under a wristwatch in a sunny clime. (The armband was worn in the opening round of cross-country running, in honour of former teammate - and sometime reader of this weblog - Tim Thomas, who died last month.) The following Tuesday’s reversion to the worst kind of cold, drippy, endlessly drizzling Melbourne wintry weather conjured memories of the steaming hotpot-and-casserole childhood I grew up in. The thick soups, the fragrant stews, the herbed roasts, and the baking dishes bearing who knew what under that unmistakable hot pastry smell. It wasn't just my house. As I slunk home from school in that unforgettable 60s-into-70s era of post-flower-powered jazz-infused pop, rock and soul - after collecting the printed Top40 (each an ad for 3UZ with DJ cartoon on the back; Allan Lappan for b...

... while I work on a fix for non-working links.  At least comments and links appear to be accessible on this early template.  Please comment - including on old posts - if you can.  I nearly lost the whole thing. Eighteen years of posts almost down the drain. I hate technology. I would like to return to posted letters, or telegrams if it's really urgent.

Extract:  "Cancel culture" has become so prevalent and damaging to free speech one of Australia's top philosophers has set up an academic journal in which contributors can publish under a fake name. ... "I certainly think that recently the majority of threats to freedom of thought have come from the left, and I regret that, of course," said Professor Peter Singer, a professor of Bioethics at Princeton's Centre for Human Values (and former Greens candidate). Extract: Richard Dawkins has been stripped of an award by the American Humanist Association which said that his statements on transgender rights "demean marginalised groups". ... (Dawkins said), "Some men choose to identify as women and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss."   Extract: Any brave soul who dares oppose those stalwarts of the left ... are immediately stoned to death in the virtual wor...

In the morning I headed north on the west side of the main street, past empty shops, their faded signage with letters missing like lost teeth. But they were not all vacant. The partial failure of a country town makes its grand buildings look even more impressive, if a little ghostly. Across the road, the Palace Hotel was a retro-excess concrete and brick art nouveau monstrosity, in a good sense. It was one of three or four hotels within a block or two, all of which looked as though they had been in competition when the original owners had commissioned their design. Gold money or wheat mnoney? Bizarrely, on the next corner, the post office (then) , and more recently , was a mock-Tudor red-brick stack straight from a story book. The town hall further along was a cross between a cream brick nuclear power station and an art deco architect's version of a medieval castle. I walked another block. These once-prosperous towns always had at least one furniture store, several clothing stores,...

* Comments and/or links on this weblog are accessible on some mobile devices but not some desktop devices. * On some devices comments are accessible by clicking story headline (this click through is slightly misaligned on my mobile device). * To add to the frustration, my mobile phone was lost on Saturday when I temporarily placed it on the bonnet of my car when pruning a tree in the front garden, after which Tracy backed out and drove off (not her fault; she could not have seen phone from driver’s seat) consigning the device to be crushed under some truck or hurled into a street drain. New SIM is on its way; new (second hand) phone obtained on Monday from Saeed in Walker’s Arcade. * On the upside, the actual fog has cleared here and it is a sunny day. 

One of six songs in this top 20 dating from the first half of the 20th century; in this case Hoagy Carmichael's 1927 standard delivered in 1957 by Nat King Cole in a voice as clear and as cool and as controlled as the clarinet in Mozart's concerto in A major. With that comparison Stardust deservedly tops out this 100.

The sun was hard west and sinking. We - being me and ten-year-old football-in-hand daughter - strode through the back streets, deserted apart from kids on rattling skateboards. We found the town's memorial gardens a few blocks back from the main street, set behind a classical wrought iron fence with an ornate arched and marble-pillared gateway at one corner. The gateway opened on a maze of pathways and garden beds and behind all of this, in the centre of the block, sat the town's heritage football ground ringed by another fence of wooden pickets. Today's football stadium is its own glass and steel architectural phenomenon; this earlier incarnation was like a post-Victorian zoo set in a gardens, the zoo being the football arena. It even had its own name, Anzac Park. An original solus grandstand loomed majestically on the north wing of the east-west oriented oval. Next to it, within handy reach of spectators, sat the Molly Taylor Memorial Kiosk - the very name of which conjur...