What I Cooked Last Night

Now, let's just get some perspective. This city, Melbourne, has about four billion people spread across 9,900 km2 (3,857.2 sq mi). That's a lot of mouths to feed. Melbourne is also often regarded as the food capital of Australia in which the hospitality and food industries thrive. Melburnians love to be outdoors, especially on warm spring nights. It's almost compulsory. What? You're inside watching television on a night like this? They sit on sweeping lawns in Victorian-era parks (or in their own manicured back gardens), sipping cold wine and eating al fresco dinners while the aroma of barbecue drifts across the suburbs, and the children run wild silhouetted by a shimmering orange sunset. They go indoors only when darkness comes; and sleep, perchance to dream of marinated steaks and pork ribs and cold white wine and warm brulee and the best city in the whole world. And food trucks. Food trucks have been around a long time, way back to the horse. For years, they ser...

It’s the little things in life. The big picture can take care of itself. When the slowest train wreck in history finally comes to a juddering halt, and the fires are put out, and the recriminations are settled, and the retributions dealt, and factional revenge enacted – which could go on for years based on form – all that really matters is ... how you like your potatoes. Or something equally inconsequential. Currently, this household is getting through many kilograms of potatoes each week, although in the context of potatoes, the metric term ‘kilogram’ has always struck me as utterly ridiculous. A description such as a hundredweight, or a bushel, or at least a sack, would ring far truer. Let's go with sack: we’re getting through a sack of potatoes a fortnight, which - if you must know - is 25 kilograms according to a British standard. In fact, we should be buying them by the sack, rather than in the pathetic little plastic bags we pick up from the supermarket or the greengrocer...