What I cooked last night.

November 1973. I lay on my bed, arranging myself around the broken spring in the mattress, and waited for it to get dark. A narrow shaft of dying light fell on the wall, slid down over the bedhead like a fragment of yellow silk and blinded me. In the bedhead a cassette player was ticking away quietly as it wound off a track from Trilogy by Emerson, Lake and Palmer.  After a while the light died and the wheels in the cassette player stopped with a ‘clack’ and I fell asleep. * Much later, last week in fact, in clearing the house after my mother’s death. I was in the room again. I recognised it like a palaeontologist recognises an unearthed mastodon skeleton: everything in the right place. The door, the window, the light switch. But repainted, recurtained, recarpeted. Not very well, but can’t be possessive about a room after all that time. Above the picture rail, a wall-length mural I painted in the 1970s - a kind of imitation tapestry of scalloped colours representing a sunrise - ha...

(I hope I spelt that right.) Pasta with garlic and oil is almost a cliché of Italian cuisine. Probably the tastiest cliché ever. Some may cavil at the garlic: you have to like garlic to like this dish. Having said that, garlic is possibly the most unfairly maligned ingredient in the history of food. How would you feel if you were a root vegetable but people kept calling you ‘Herb’? Of course, if you want to call garlic a herb there’s plenty of justification for that on the internet, just as there is if you want believe a cat is a human, a tote bag is a criminal accomplice, or an apple is a timepiece. But then there's the flavour. Many may be more concerned with the aromatic after-effects of garlic than the flavour itself which is earthy and pungent and adds so much to so many dishes.  In any case, the pleasure derived from eating a large bowl of rustic-style pasta aglio e olio flecked with freshly-picked parsley (a((n))herb) outweighs any fear of what people may think about yo...

A weekend in 1972. The sedan, gold metallic and book-ended with doomed chrome, hums its new-engine tune as it sails east along Canterbury Road. Somewhere near Camberwell it passes beneath a railway viaduct bearing a garish advertising poster, and the seven-year-old sitting next to my mother in the back seat sniggers at the suggestive bath towel brand painted across its width. Beside my father in the front seat I roll my eyes at the boy’s juvenility, while slowly rotating the volume control on the car radio, so that Marc Bolan can drown the back-seat sniggers. (Slowly, because if the volume goes up too fast or too much, my father will snap the radio off with a punctuation-like punch of his left hand. It happened once before with the Rolling Stones’ 'Honky Tonk Women', although I was never sure if it was the volume or the song’s content that made my father kill the song. I never asked him and he never told me. He was the weak silent type.) The gold car draws closer to that blue g...

The scones at Miss Marple’s seem to have been baked in a kind of four-part loaf and split into four even squarish towers. According to reviews this apparently makes them contentious, like refusing to pray in a Norman square-towered church when you’ve grown up with Gothic.  The appeal of the scone is not its beauty, but its inscrutable taste: a bland, doughy buttress embraces a blitz of sweet/acid jam, the two opposing taste and texture sensations both then being subsumed beneath a cold, unctuous blanket of cream, synthesising a flavour complexity like no other.  And from such a humble food item! Miss Marple (she is almost a person at this end of the review) pairs her scones with Yorkshire Gold tea, a rich, smooth blend that is vastly superior to most caterer’s blend ‘English Breakfast’ contenders; in my opinion as good as  my personal favourite  from across the Irish Sea. * Miss Marple’s Tearoom, 382 Mt Dandenong Tourist Road, Sassafras. Website: 'When we take ...

Saturday morning: you wake and wonder for a millisecond which weekday it is, and in an instant you realise. The express train you are on has pulled into some unexpected rest stop.  The day before I had rung a café in the hills to make a booking for five, having failed to book online. ‘We don’t take phone bookings,’ the woman who answered had said. ‘Or online for that matter,’ she had added, as if the place had achieved some kind of victory over the digital age. ‘Just turn up, and the attendant will take your name and give you a time when a table should be free.’  How would they know, I had wondered. * As far as the view goes, Melbourne ends at the hills, a purplish blue graph that looks like the season’s temperature variations written across the sky. Today the graph was clouded so you couldn’t see the highs and lows.  East, east, east: we drive what is virtually a direct line across Melbourne. Bell Street, Eastern Freeway, Maroondah Highway, Boronia Road. Mountain Highway...