What I Cooked Last Night

The highway hugged the river's voluptuous curves, staying faithful for a hundred rolling kilometres before tiring of the relationship and breaking straight northwest. The river rolled southwards and then west, betrayed by the line of red gums following it like a lost army. Then red dirt and orange groves in perfect square rows. Late in the day the sun drove shafts of light through the gaps, flickering gold on the road like a projector that has run out of film. It was still hot. Swan Hill had come and gone. No room at the inn: inn being one of those camping grounds that is a mini-city at this time of year, complete with a massive playground with lurid plastic climbing toys about a hundred feet high, a giant waterslide above that and six thousand sweltering caravans below. You could hear it coming. I stopped anyway and went into the reception office. Instead of a slamming flywire screen, you go in through an electric sensor door and are greeted by air conditioning, grey decor like ...

This is the kind of thing that is ridiculed by the purists and loved by everyone else. I walked half a mile to the dusty Foodworks supermarket in the small country town that the river winds through - or should I say the town built around several bends in the river - and bought a tin of cream of chicken soup, a packet of grated parmesan cheese and some fresh button mushrooms. From its wine shop annex, I bought a bottle of Deakin Estate chardonnay. Then back to the river. I set some water to boil over the flame and, in a pan on a cooler part of the fire, I warmed some arborio rice in olive oil. When  the water bubbled I carefully and gradually poured some into the rice, interspersing it with white wine. I opened the tin of cream of chicken soup and folded the contents through the simmering rice, once again gradually. Its aroma was so good I was tempted to eat some of the salty, chickeny ooze straight out of the can. (I actually did this as a child - canned soup concentrate is del...

If you have the ingredients, this is easily achievable when camping if you’re good at juggling pots and pans over a slow fire. Not literally, of course; although that no doubt would entertain your fellow campers should the river rolling by cease to amuse. In any case, couscous is just instant pasta and the lamb is just a straightforward stew with a few exotic spices. But the aroma! If you thought the last recipe was an outdoor drawcard, don’t cook this in a busy campsite. A kilogram of onions gently frying with cinnamon and raisins? Paddlesteamers would tie up. * Place one kilogram of cubed lamb, a big chopped onion and 1.75 litres of water into a large pot over hot embers. When it comes to the boil, throw in a teaspoon each of ginger and cinnamon, four cloves and a good shake each of salt and ground black pepper. Too easy so far. Open a cold beer. Keep the pot on a low simmer for half the afternoon; i.e., from lunchtime to afternoon tea, or from that to dinnertime. (Or ditt...

So they turned Victoria Bitter back into a beer, reissued the earlier pack design and brought back the old advertising line, a hard-earned thirst needs a big cold beer . Good*. I cooked up the following stew while camping along the Murray River recently. Browning the meat takes a little extra effort and an additional implement or two. Optionally you can throw the whole lot in together. When your pot starts steaming, the aroma will drift along the bank and you'll have visitors. Beef with beer. In a large pot over the camp fire, place one chopped onion, a dash of oil, 500g diced beef (dredged in seasoned flour and browned), a chopped carrot, two sticks of chopped celery, a bay leaf or two, a chopped leek, a sprig of thyme, two tablespoons of tomato puree or paste, a tablespoon of brown sugar, one can of Victoria Bitter and enough beef stock to cover. Let it bubble away for a few hours. Serve with potatoes wrapped in foil and buried in the coals for an hour or two ...

Late in the afternoon, we were on a beach on the southern side of the Murray River. The sky was that shocking blue you get in the inland and the day was still hot. The river was flowing north-east, which means the beach was on one of those bends that doubles back on itself, a billion-year-old fluke of nature. The water was silent and deadly. You could see the current out towards the middle; fast busy wrinkles that would have you downstream in a flash. The boys waded to a small island near the shore that was just mud with an ancient gum tree growing in it. The gum was bent and its lower limbs dragged in the flowing water and it looked like an old fisherman trying to hold a net. No wonder the aborigines saw spirits in everything; the quality of light and the depth of the shadows out here makes figures of everything. They practised going along in the softer current close to shore. I stood downstream a little and showed them how to swim towards the bank with the flow, and not against i...

Cool climate? It was cold. I turned the heater switch to warm and opened the little grates in the dash. The country at the back of Ballarat was high and green and there was no sky between the ground and the clouds. They seemed to sit on the hills. The rain had stopped. It turned out to be the wettest September day in fifty years but I didn’t know that then. I was driving on a single-lane B road with no line markings. I hadn’t seen a car since Clunes, a small town with verandah-shaded shops hugging the empty winding main street. The streets always wind in old gold mining towns because they grew up around the diggings. No planners involved. Out of Clunes and on past old mounds of slag overgrown with grasses, and into the green made almost luminous by the teary sky. The Irish came here in their thousands and stayed after the gold rush; it reminded them of home. Now I was higher. The clouds sat; no blue anywhere. Then the green hills started growing trellises bearing curling shoots. W...

There’s nowhere for the water to go. It just sits there on both sides of the narrow road and it feels like you are driving across some kind of inland sea. Graduated depth markers at intervals on each side of the road remind you how far under water you would have been after the January flood, and the September one before that. This was the road that branches west-south-west off the Western Highway at the historical marker (something to do with gold) 6.5 kilometres out of Horsham. It rides the plain and drops you onto the Wimmera Highway near Natimuk, where floods have antagonised the locals for 150 years. A marker tells you a 48 year old coach operator was washed away from here in a flash flood in 1893. Never saw it coming. I drove across the inland sea, and now it was raining again. The sky had that luminous, sickly green-purple light that says storm. Visibility dropped. I switched the lights on. The rain was deafening but someone in the car, it might have been William, asked if th...

A small drought-ravaged town in flat, semi-arid north western Victoria yesterday logged its highest rainfall on record. Town by the name of Rainbow .

The event (see yesterday's post) commenced somewhere in the wider part in the distance and proceeded into the foreground where, at the narrowest section, a fierce southerly blast blew everyone's hats into the water; and then along the road at the top, down around the lip at the end of the peninsula, up the steps and back. The waves of wild Bass Strait make a stark comparison with Port Phillip Bay's gentler waters. What you don't see in the picture is the Bellarine Peninsula, like the opposite crab's claw. It appears so close as you crest the last rise that you think you could long-jump the Rip and land on it. No wonder so many ships were lost at the point where they meet: "On April 3 1936, at 7:30AM, and in relatively calm conditions, Nairana, under command of Captain McIntyre, was approaching Port Phillip heads with a full load of cargo, while most of the 88 passengers were either in their cabins or having breakfast in the dining saloon. A few passengers w...

1.6 billion bees - 120 semi-trailer loads - required urgently or we don't eat almonds. "We have just a two-week window to get the hives and have them in place when the trees bloom next month," he said yesterday. The numbers are staggering: 52,000 hives, each containing 30,000 bees; to pollinate 12,000 almond trees grown by 7,000 growers producing a $100 million crop. Many of the trees border the Murray Valley Highway from Boundary Bend to Robinvale, probably my favourite drive ever; Murray River to one side, seemingly endless almond groves to the other. Further north the almonds give way to red soil and orange trees and beyond that, Mildura; and then nothing but vast emptiness and interstate trucks.