What I cooked last night.

This afternoon’s  Stolen Moments  on 3RRR offered a fine three-way tribute to musical artists who have recently departed this mortal and musical coil.  Starting with a brilliant tribute to Tony Bennett featuring the superlative 1964 space-jazz version of A Taste of Honey,  the show featured selections from Sinéad O’Connor including You Do Something To Me followed by an extensive João Donato set. Thank you Bailey, announcer extraordinary. https://www.rrr.org.au/player-items/go/300382

Fragrant celery-like flavour with a herbal nose comes from celeriac, the ugly vegetable at the back of the greengrocer’s shelf. They were a dollar each so I picked two and made an excellent alternative to the usual potato mash. No recipe really required. Peel, boil until soft, mash with lashings of butter, salt and pepper.  I served the ugly vegetable alongside a slow-roasted slab of beef and a whole cauliflower lightly boiled and then drowned in bechamel over which I crumbled blue cheese and walnuts and baked, covered, for an hour in the same slow oven.

Barry Humphries' view of Moonee Ponds was pre-dated by the writer quoted above, who opined that, rather than being a hive of insular housewives, the inner suburb was a microcosm of broader Australia. (Extract above from The Moonee Ponds Club: Celebrating One Hundred and Twenty Five Years by Paul Kennedy, published by Clarity In Design 2021.)

The books were in a quiet room, high up on a shelf, in between the Leon Urises and Richard Papes and 1950s Readers Digests, and the middle-brow 1950s coloured-spine Book Club selections that confettied a million safe middle-class bookshelves in the post-war years. I pulled them out when no-one else was around. I was ten or eleven. I could just reach the highest shelf. They were grouped together, like breast-to-breast Zebra Finches perched in an aviary of budgerigars, their own special little genre. The dozen or so books had black-and-white photo sections. No colour: black-and-white is artful, shocking, intimate. You couldn't help looking. Bodies, naked. Skin, too much skin, too much detail. Thin. Multiple. Arms, legs in all directions. Rolling over each other. Then other photos. Strange objects that looked obscene. Then the clothing that the bodies had discarded. Massive piles, like some rag trade warehouse that had been upended. Teeth. False. Shoes. Shoes were the worst. Shoes are...

It was early afternoon in spring, one carefree year in the early 1990s. We were camping deep in the Victorian alps, having left Melbourne in warm sunny conditions that morning. Up in the mountains, it was cooler and fresher. Clean water flowed down from the peaks and it was drinkable straight from the stream.  We were as far in as you can get via four-wheel drive; you could hike deeper into the bush but we were there for only two nights. We had approached the location via Licola (the southern gateway to the Alpine National Park, population 11, and the only Victorian town not connected to the electricity grid), and from there we had proceeded slowly along a narrow four-wheel-drive track through a valley between two rises. There were four of us. Paul Murphy; one of his mates; and me and my son from my first marriage. He was about twelve.   At the campsite, ridges towered above us on both sides of the creek. The campfire was crackling and a billy had been set over it. Sun sl...

High up behind Arthur's Seat, a muddy trail winds off from a large barn near Main Ridge Road and heads south, following the road towards Westernport Bay. As the narrow dedicated horse trail is set well back from the road, cars pose no hazard; the horses sometimes face advancing mountain bicycles whose riders expect the horses to execute a sideways jump into the bushes. Below from left, Princeton; his rider Alex; Harley.

Coddle, bluntly, is a loose combination of two types of pig accompanied by onions and potatoes. It is also an unbeatable winter comfort dish, emitting while cooking warming aromas that will bring them running.  Coddle: as Irish as James Joyce. Dice four thick strips of bacon and slice two brown onions into rings and lightly fry them in whatever medium you prefer. Remove. In the same pan, lightly brown four pork sausages.  Layer the onion and bacon mixture in a casserole with the sausages and the potatoes.   Add a little dried sage, some white pepper and half a cup of chicken stock, just enough to steam the contents of the casserole. Bake 30 to 45 minutes. Garnish with parsley. Serve with Irish soda bread; or any bread for that matter, you could use a crusty Vienna loaf with that typical not-crumbly but slightly gluey orange-yellow crust which is my current favourite, to mop up the gravy. Red wine? Guinness? Barry's tea?

I followed the freeway, first east and then south and then south-west; just over half a clockface around Port Phillip Bay. Free of roadworks again the road gets you to the peninsula in ninety minutes; at least from where we are in the inner north. The elevated southbound bridge circles the city passing a million lights, which drift behind like some passing galaxy.  City behind, the car slid south, engine a sleepy purl, while the radio burbled notes out into space, a slipstream of sound that will never die but reverberate out into the universe and infinity. The program: Passing Notes on PBS; track, Whisper of Fall by Respira. Night driving music, as long as you don’t drift off.  Alex in the big comfortable velour seat (the car is a lounge room on wheels) behind me talks, falls silent, finally snoozing; past where the lights from the houses on the cliff-face of Mount Martha shine like trinkets on a Christmas tree.  Then west again and through Capel Sound and Rye, and  ...