What I cooked last night.

The song burst onto the charts in the golden halcyon days of early 1972; a rollingly precocious, almost insane melody with bouncy allusive single-syllable lyrics,  bringing forth in the listener nothing but sheer unadulterated joy; except for the actual adults of the time who, as always, read into the song every weird obsession they could think of. I remember the song being banned from some radio stations, as if in 1972 we were still struggling vainly against the Reformation.  The writer, Melanie Safka, who died last week at age 76, later admitted having written the song, Brand New Key, in about fifteen minutes. It was a very good fifteen minutes, producing two minutes and twenty -six seconds of pop-song perfection. RIP.

Blurb on a bottle of AirWick air freshener:   Transport yourself to the orange-lined streets of charming cities like the city of Seville, Spain. Be transformed with the zesty fragrance of sweet citrus accompanied by warm and alluring aromatic undertones. I'm glad they pointed out that Seville was in Spain.

Six feet high and rising, to be precise.  Rain and moderate heat have conspired to produce this multi-bloomed cluster of magnificent pure pink petalled flowers; just one of many on the incredible Radox Bouquet rose variety, first developed in England in 1980 by Harkness, with one of its ancestor varieties being Fruhlingsmorgen. The photo is not intentionally soft focus, it is just sheer out of focus - the cluster was swaying in the wind. * The rose taps at the window ... with flower-laden boughs (With apologies to Gustav Mahler)

In Martin Boyd's 1969 novel  The Tea-Time of Love  one of the characters, a Brigadier Cheston, describes a favourite fish recipe:      'There's a very good way of cooking haddock in cream,' (the brigadier) was saying, 'but a bit expensive nowadays. You put sliced tomatoes in a baking dish with some peppercorns and a bay leaf.  Lay the haddock fillets on that, pour cream over the lot, and give it a quarter-of-an-hour in the oven.'      Boyd's novel is set in the immediate post-war period of food shortages and the expense the brigadier refers to is not the fish but the cream: such luxuries were often not available.       I tried the recipe. Rather than haddock which is not available here I used rockling, a mild-flavoured white fish which holds its shape well and flakes away into ideal fork-friendly pieces when cooked.       Lining the base of a casserole with fresh thinly sliced truss tomatoes, I placed t...

Fusilli avellinisi are long pasta shapes with an irregular twist. I buy them from the fruit shop in Sydney Road where they are a couple of dollars cheaper ($3.99) than the supermarkets, not to mention the 'gourmet' food stores ($5.99-$6.20). It was a hot summer night, fewer of which we have had this season despite the horror-show predictions of the weather obsessives, given the change from El Nino to La Nina or vice versa. Can't ever recall which is which. Moreover, right now we are in the middle of a forty-eight-hour curtain of rain that has dropped on the first act of summer and broken the banks of Merri Creek. Nevertheless a few nights ago we were on the bay and it was hot and dinner was a large serving platter of fusilli avellinisi served with flat beans.  Also known as romano beans, these flat bean monsters are about eight inches long at their peak. I cut about ten of these into inch-long sections, blanched them with some broccoli florets for a minute and then sauteed ...