tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-60584462024-03-16T12:11:44.357+11:00What I cooked last night.Recipes and ruminations from a small house in a big city.paul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.comBlogger1957125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-21102684172088327962024-03-06T14:22:00.010+11:002024-03-06T14:25:07.113+11:00Apple pie with walnut topping.The neighbours left a large bag of apples they had harvested in the wicker chair on our front porch one hot day in late summer. A text message said they’d be away for a few days, and we might also collect some cherry tomatoes from their garden before they became overripe. I opened their big gate and walked into a kind of eclectic sub-tropical Japanese-style garden in which flowering vines paul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-52724684638595589132024-02-22T00:40:00.011+11:002024-02-22T10:24:58.145+11:00Couples.The couple walking up the hill was bent into a wind; or rather, were: she slightly ahead, he struggling. We crossed the road just ahead of them. Recognition: she was the mother of my two grown-up children; he, the man who married her later.Two couples, a partner of each who were once married to each other, had converged on a corner in one of those disjointed greetings that grow out of sudden paul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-70882011680689943932024-02-06T16:31:00.110+11:002024-02-07T15:01:27.446+11:00Rosella: the preserving company, not the bird. Rosella was an early Melbourne cannery. The following link (that seems to be un-hyperlinkable) is a potted history of the Richmond company. Rosella products included game soup, kidney soup and mutton broth and were far much more important than what today would be merely ‘convenience’ foods; in the pre-refrigeration era they provided reliable weatherproof sustenance. As an example, see in thepaul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-9683371047075197232024-02-02T21:42:00.000+11:002024-02-02T21:42:12.266+11:00Make a chicken happy: set it free and then eat its liver.New product: ‘Free Range Chicken Pâté: made (only) from free range Tasmanian chickens’.I find invoking woke sensibilities before eating dead animals to be somewhat macabre, like some quasi-religious moral cleansing.paul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-72857610696697410312024-01-30T10:24:00.005+11:002024-01-30T10:25:22.627+11:00"Don't go too fast, but I go pretty far ..."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 paul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-43360962413222915742024-01-25T15:44:00.003+11:002024-01-25T15:44:34.170+11:00Why read Hemingway? 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.paul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-51701066842673744072024-01-20T13:19:00.006+11:002024-01-20T13:19:57.132+11:00The height of summer.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 paul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-37225794194725263752024-01-19T14:59:00.012+11:002024-01-20T02:03:45.706+11:00Rockling in cream sauce with peppercorns.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 paul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-52490489606614910812024-01-08T20:20:00.040+11:002024-01-09T01:22:30.866+11:00Pasta with a twist and home-made pesto.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 Ninopaul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-91508703528342481802023-12-29T18:02:00.016+11:002023-12-29T18:59:40.112+11:00Christmas redux.Same place, same food, same kookaburra This Christmas was 2009 all over again.Just fewer aunts and uncles. Fourteen years takes its toll. And, of course, more children, including our thirteen-year-old.paul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-21762388582434234302023-12-29T17:13:00.007+11:002023-12-29T17:20:26.851+11:00Smoke and mirrors.A large panel on the front of the 500g pack of bacon proudly boasted: Smoked Using Australian Hardwood. In tiny print on the back of the pack: 'imported bacon'. The majority of such bacon comes from countries subsidising their pork production, placing Australian producers at a disadvantage. (Importation also adds, for those obsessed by such matters, to carbon dioxide emissions; however thosepaul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-7110640735331062262023-12-25T00:37:00.004+11:002023-12-25T15:18:02.658+11:00Eggs on toast under threat.The ninety-five-year-old does little cooking now, a notable exception her ever favourite supper. She fries two eggs, toasts two slices of bread, and enjoys eggs on toast surrounded by memory's ghosts, seated politely in empty chairs around her like Dickens’ semi-formed characters from A Christmas Carol.As she ascended the mountainous nineties, Edmund Hillary-like, she occasionally forgot to take paul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-6794068112402430292023-12-15T21:33:00.002+11:002023-12-15T21:33:38.488+11:00Letter from Germany: torturing the neighbours.The ninety-five-year-old can still read, but likes to have someone read to her, especially four-point type cooking instructions in pink out of red on food packages, for example. Oddly enough SBS foreign language film subtitles are no trouble at all to her. She reads along perfectly but still has the sound at top volume presumably so the next-door neighbours can have a French lesson.A letter paul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-7971499019551817932023-11-25T00:23:00.007+11:002023-11-25T00:50:47.938+11:00Whispering wind imitates Cerulean blue Holden Belmont.She rang me late; it must have been 9.30 or 10 o'clock. He was coming up the drive, she said. She had heard all the familiar noises, she told me; the big side gate that was built in the late 1960s, steel and cyclone mesh, to keep children in and wandering dogs out. It groaned with its sheer weight when anyone opened it. She had heard it just like that day in 1968 when my father had to stop and paul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-20282653701252854752023-11-23T00:41:00.002+11:002023-11-23T00:41:06.895+11:00Well, what the hell did I cook last night?Twenty years and twelve days ago I started writing recipes into an online diary. It was easier than my earlier habit of writing on bits of old paper or on the backs of used envelopes which were then filed inside cookbooks in no particular order. My new online system eliminated the need to find notebooks or paper, or pens for that matter. As a professional writer, I was always running out of thesepaul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-77491810099093321632023-11-20T00:27:00.000+11:002023-11-20T00:27:21.045+11:00A beach walk in early spring.Tom and I walked down from the beach house on the hill, and along Canterbury Jetty Road towards the ocean, and then branched off where the walking path follows the shoreline. Here, the wild broken cliffs of the beach itself are obscured behind impassable dense bush and steep sand dunes, and at night you can hear the groaning ocean roar as it smashes itself against the rocks. As usual we werepaul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-83281453784408342952023-11-08T00:01:00.008+11:002023-11-08T09:06:19.539+11:00A Tale of Two Roberts.All of that fourth form year I sat in the back row, left side; the quiet corner, equidistant from the exit door at back right of the room and the teacher on the platform at the front. Classrooms were large in those days; more like lecture theatres. I used to smuggle in a cassette player and regale nearby students with early 1970s progressive rock.My deskmate Robert was a Bob Dylan fan and owned paul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-13245640656215252392023-11-03T16:29:00.005+11:002023-11-03T16:29:48.609+11:00Beef Bourguinon and Roquefort cheese.It was just an ordinary beef stew; nothing to write home about. I used oyster blade, the cut in which the layer of gelatinous membrane spliced between two layers of muscle, like a gold vein in quartz, melts under long slow cooking and bastes - or more accurately lubricates - the cut until the fibres break down. I sliced the meat into large cubes the size of matchboxes, dusted it in flour and saltpaul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-62721204782749483882023-10-25T23:46:00.110+11:002023-10-26T14:01:42.870+11:00Very old blog post from 2005 - posted originally on one of my other semi-forgotten weblogs.In the early years of the century weblog writers circulated amongst themselves what were known as ‘memes’ - essentially questionnaires or surveys on various subjects, the following of which concerned books. The questions and my answers, posted on one an early weblog, were as follows:How many books do you own?Far too many. Hundreds. maybe thousands. They lurk, they shuffle, they sit on dark paul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-77875997128788397232023-10-24T01:30:00.036+11:002023-11-02T00:41:05.881+11:00WSJ on NYT: the stupidity of ‘reporting’.Some 'journalists' quotes are exquisitely revealing:“During any breaking news event we report what we know as we learn it.” (New York Times spokesman quoted in the Wall Street Journal and republished in The Australian, 23 October, on the Gaza hospital explosion.)Reporters ‘learn’? Not ‘investigate’ and ‘verify’?No, the NYT robot is on another journalistic planet; the one on which news capture andpaul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-70773348899500422542023-10-24T01:00:00.001+11:002023-10-24T01:00:09.800+11:00Roses: the obsession that has no cure.It's the weather. The roses are on fire, breaking out everywhere. Pick them madly, I always told the children who were hesitant, as if cutting off such perfection in nature were vandalism. For every rose you put in a vase, or of whose petals you scatter on the grass, I told them, two more will flower. Or four. Or six. Yes, counter-intuitive. Since she was tall enough to reach the blooms Alex paul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-36925409772857939982023-10-20T00:59:00.001+11:002023-10-22T23:16:16.172+11:00A shorter history of linoleum.Some philosopher, or it might have been a scientist or a chef, said that the sense of smell elicits the strongest memories. You can't hear, taste, see, or touch it; so it must be true. The others are only recognition; each smell must be a sensation in the brain that is implanted the first time and simply gets poked, like a cow prod. Don’t ask me.The smell, which was a blend of new hessian, 1950s paul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-59897086589942915462023-10-12T01:06:00.003+11:002023-10-12T01:42:29.096+11:00“ … descent from civility …”Once Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard is incredulous: “I never thought we would crumple to this … people chanting these things … (‘gas the Jews’ … etc) … is a catastrophic descent from civility that I thought I’d never see. … If you’re a law-abiding Jewish person in Sydney who wanted to go along to the Opera House ( … lit up in blue and white … ) and told you had to stay at home … what ispaul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-24638479317061972192023-10-11T01:15:00.005+11:002023-10-11T01:29:05.905+11:00Keeping the peace, NSW-style.News report: Sydney, 10 October: ‘ … a man was dragged away by police as he held what appeared to be an Israeli flag … (he was ) removed by multiple (sic) officers and threatened with arrest.’ No link necessary - it’s all over the web. NSW police ‘assistant commissioner’ in charge of this - Tony Cooke - has a history of Orwellian behaviour.Cooke went on, referring to neither side, “This is paul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058446.post-80561205679582001242023-10-06T09:23:00.002+11:002023-10-06T10:17:44.280+11:00Baked corned beef hash.Yes, not new. But good, even if only once every seven years. It's probably been longer.The cold weather had returned with a vengeance, earlier having been spurned by the kind of spring warmth we haven’t seen for something like seven years. That Nino thing or whatever it’s called. Let’s hope it stays away permanently. Either way, the chilly blast called for homely, filling fare. This time I paul kennedyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17237328574655467680noreply@blogger.com1