What I cooked last night.

The race to the solstice had been easily won; the weeks had flown and been flung aside, bits of history never to happen again.  But then the hard part. The solstice was a chimera; the promise of daylight remaining a few minutes longer masked the prospect of a long cold wet miserable July and August. Inhabitants of other climes might jeer, and point to their winters of ten below, or their blinding snowstorms. But snow is romantic; a Melbourne winter is a bone-chilling wind-blown marathon, without the northern hemisphere’s Christmas - with its logfire-and-sleigh bells imagery - in the middle. (We get to endure that hokey European nonsense when it’s forty in the shade: Celsius.) A fellow runner - a Canadian - once admitted to me one bleak winter night that the chill wind that whipped frozen Antarctic air and dropped its cut-throat icicles onto Olympic Park, the Botanical Gardens and their surrounding pathways on which we were running, Lycra-tighted and gloved, was colder, more glacial...

Walls fall; presidents and popes are shot (if not fatally, like musicians); rockets bearing civilians drop out of the sky; clothes grow pads; music becomes a visual medium (on hearing a tune a listener, confusing senses, exclaims, ‘I remember that video!’ ); Roth/Updike/Bellow carry on jousting*. Meanwhile, you had to eat. Not everything in the 1980s was of the 1980s, such as savoury mince, an example of the kind of mundane dish that became a default meal keeping the beef grinders in business like ‘spaghetti bolognese’ does today, its reddish-beige lava bubbling over cheddar-coloured pasta mountainsides in the bowl-volcanoes of a million family tables. ‘Bolognese again?’ Savoury? That redundant word is one of the cooking clichés that never disappears. What else is minced beef except savoury? What does it even mean? The word is scattered like confetti through the recipe supplements (lift-outs, the publishers called them) stapled into those mid-century women’s magazines that sold in the...

The Pink Pussycat - as cryptic a name as I could think of to drop at the next student party - was not the only source of income, little as it was, including tips. Melbourne Airport was arguably an even better conversation starter ( what, you fly planes? - people always think the obvious) but the work here was even more mundane than pouring a ‘taste’ (a charade that even then was embarrassingly outdated) of Yalumba Carte d’Or riesling or McWilliams Shiraz Cabernet into the glass of the male half of a dining couple so that, after making a method acting impression of a furrow-browed, purse-lipped judge at Mundus Vini, he would decide whether they would drink it or not. Indeed, the airport job - money is obviously tight in this anonymous early 1980s Carltonian mise en scène - involved little more than bussing Budget rental cars from their terminal drop-off point to a depot back in the endless sun-parched acres of tarmac in the backblocks of Tullamarine, where I cleared their overflowing ...

The pub - hotel - mentioned in the previous post was, of course, Poynton’s Carlton Club, on the corner of Grattan and Cardigan, opposite the Royal Women's Hospital. The Carlton Club was three short blocks from the small terrace house, whitewashed brick in the fashion of the Greeks (the owner was Con, a barman at the Continental Hotel in Lonsdale Street, to whom I paid the rent), in which we lived for five Arcadian years (an Arcadia chequered by the stop-start linear domesticities of child-raising; the eternal nightmare-producing (even now) failure to complete a degree; and the death,  late one night , of an older sibling, announced at the door by a couple of dark blue uniforms whose lines and colouration and stance and timing told me all I needed to know.  Nine minutes walk, slightly downhill; across Elgin, Faraday, and Grattan. The hotel’s Cardigan Street side had a separate door with a 1950s backlit and illustrated sign over it: Pink Pussy Cat Bistro , the cartooni...

I had a call from the auctioneer just as I was turning right for home into Sydney Road, on a pale sunny late Friday morning. I had been down to Carlton where the cafe I frequent permits writers to spend an hour or more over one coffee exuding words. Or not. He thanked me for the gift of wine and the signed copy of the book about the Moonee Ponds business whose story I had written a couple of years ago.  I had delivered the gift of wine and book to the Mt Alexander Rd agency a few days earlier. The book part of the gift was not an ego trip; the agency had pitched itself as an expert in the district, so I thought it might fill in a few colour-by-number spots in the patchwork of local history. The auctioneer told me he had already dipped into it and had recognised several names, locations, and events. The wine accompanying the book was a Henschke, a label I could not afford now; the owner of the hotel at which I worked in the late 1970s and early 1980s had always opened a bottle (well...

The day of the house auction, a couple of weeks ago, had been significant: the final day of autumn, the end of our 72-year family ownership of a west-facing, sunset-drenched oblong on the edge of the great city of the south, and the last day of warm weather. The following morning had dawned ominously cold to a ferocious blast from Antarctica. (‘Ominously’? It could have been any adverb - ‘oddly’, ‘ironically’, ‘appropriately’, ‘strangely’ - as long as it signified meaning in the context of sheer randomness. We fear the anarchy of existence, so we invent fate, investing the electrons and quarks and bosons with the ability to talk: untold billions of particles as seers and prophets, inhabiting infinity, unable to shut up.)  I think while I cook. It’s purposeless, but fun. It makes time go by: the ‘don’t watch the kettle boil’ theory. Thinking helps pasta cook faster when the sauce is already done. If I don’t think, I will keep checking it, or pulling the griller out or opening the ov...

 R.I.P. Brian Wilson.

The road out of Melbourne rose to Ballarat through smooth green saddle-back hills like giant rearing horses embedded in the landscape. Shafts of sun pierced the clouds, setting the hills off in an eerie luminosity.  We turned off halfway to Ballarat, heading for the cross-country running race. The course was in a vineyard which sat south of the freeway on a flank - several flanks - of the rising hills. Vineyard is misleading; it was of several hundred acres. The turnoff twisted left and hairpin-bent for a kilometre, and then we turned right - ‘cross-country race’ read the sign - into a small valley with vines stretching up and away into the distance. Tents had been pitched and a generator-powered inflatable arch - the finish line - had been set up and roped off. Small triangular orange flags on metal spikes marking the course curved away and disappeared tinily over a hill. Bang. They still start these things with a gun. In the colours I had worn in a race at Ballam Park nineteen ye...

We sat down at 10 o’clock - hipster breakfast time - in a 1980s cafe (you can tell by the aged clientele) in the shopping strip that runs east-west a few hundred metres from the house; the house that will, in two hours plus auctioneer spiel time, fall out of the family’s ownership for the first time in 74 years, signalled by the anti-climactic slap, like an egg cracking, of a rolled-up contract into the auctioneer’s left hand. Or his right, if he is left-handed. The shopping strip is a drawcard because it has cafes which have ascended the real estate pecking order of residential desirability to rank narrowly below ‘schools’; in some cases above. Our cafe, cornily named Strudels despite bearing no apparent affinity with Northern European cuisine, culture, staff or décor - indeed, it is run as so many of these places are by an industrious ex-subcontinental family - stands where once an aircraft engine maintenance plant dominated the block, its massive patients - Rolls-Royce Darts from Vi...

She’s been gone what, seven, eight months? It seems only weeks since the disembodied voice of the nurse came through the loudspeaker in the car as I crossed a darkening ridge between Daylesford and Hepburn Springs in early spring last year. ‘She’s not here, again,’ she had announced, tired. I could only repeat that my 96-year-old mother’s normal pattern - did I say normal? - was to trundle her walker to Keilor Road, day or night, the clock can say what it likes, and then return. She always had. However, if absent at medication time, the attending nurse was obliged to find her or put in a missing report. That night had been in the middle of my three-day intermission in the long-running tragi-comedy of my mother’s last act, which had stretched out longer than I could have imagined into a kind of medieval tapestry, its frayed threads portraying faded memories; pale horses with flaring nostrils rearing at nothing; messenger angels posing as infants past; small figures with indecipherable ...

Everyone seems to agree that everything you can eat tastes better in pastry.  Obvious hyperbolic exaggeration? Or was it a television commercial I once wrote for a brand of pastry in the late 1980s? I can’t remember. Jump-cuts of a kind of dysfunctional, in a quirky way, not an angry way, family making pastries: pastry pies, pastry hot dogs, turnovers, tarts, sweet pastries with raspberry jam and custard and dried fruits; and on it went, a real weekend afternoon cook-up, flour everywhere, and an end-super over the vision reading: everything tastes better in pastry ; then a quick cut to a three-year old on the floor who has found a piece of dropped pastry and is wrapping it around a small doll and all you can see sticking out of the pastry is its hair and its winky eyes; and the super dissolves to the words: almost everything , and then the brand logo. Later, we had to re-edit the end of the commercial to add a still of the family eating their pastries around the table wit...

A hot Friday morning, oddly quiet. On ANZAC Day, everything is closed and nothing happens except a football game at three in the afternoon. Everything before that is forbidden. Odd also, given the previous Friday, Good Friday, had been chaos on the roads, a day to race around and prepare for Easter, go camping, buy chocolate rabbits to hide for the kids, whatever. ANZAC Day, no. State-sponsored faux romanticism is the new religion; the papers, what’s left of them, are full of decrepit hundred-year-olds wearing rotting ribbons and old medals, having lived five times as long as the boys of eighteen and nineteen who threw their bullet-ridden bodies, full of hope and the seed of alpha-children, into French mud, all in the cause of the King.  Nothing to do. So I went on a walk, across a valley and three suburbs.  And back again. I set off under an intense mid-morning sun, passing houses with half-drawn blinds like sleepy eyes. Through the Vale, past the football ground and diagonal...

In the beginning this weblog was a place to store improvised recipes that had (kind of) worked - given that I am no chef. Before that I scribbled ideas on scraps of paper and put them between the pages of cookbooks - a random collection that included one with blank pages framed in stock illustrations, in which you transcribed your own recipes. I had dutifully penned in a couple between the parted lettuce leaves and artful scatterings of peas and shards of cheese; and then shelved it. I could not throw the book out because it had been a gift from someone. Who? I forget. Sentimentality makes you a slave, even to the unknown. Conscripting leftovers was an early gastronomic tic that persists today, given that in this house of coming-and-going teenagers, eating might occur at all hours or sometimes none. On a good day they’ll eat like six tigers; a casserole of stuffed capsicum, the rest of the ham, a cold roast chicken, last night’s pasta carbonara.  Corned beef hash, gourmet-style. It...