What I Cooked Last Night

Who needs NASA? Illustration by William, 2010.

William (green shirt) listens at three-quarter time huddle during Coburg practice match (v. Frankston), Coburg City Oval, Friday April 3. (Picture courtesy Coburg FC.)

After last Sunday's thrilling finish to the Phillip Island 400, the boys got to work with their HBs. The Polestar is a beautiful piece of machinery, its sculpted lines reminiscent of the hulking powerhouse racing cars of decades gone by. Garry Rogers of Garry Rogers Motorsport, whose driver Scott McLaughlin stole Sunday's race in the last straight, posted the resulting pictures here . Well done boys. Now it's a hard career decision: commercial artist or racing driver. Hmmmmm. (Herge, who wrote and illustrated the Tintin series, started out as an illustrator in the automotive industry.)

A jar of home-made tomato sauce, bought at yesterday's school fete and no doubt made by someone's grandmother, was the base for this easy dish: Chicken Provencale. Saute a couple of chopped onions and a clove of garlic in olive oil. Add about a kilogram of cubed chicken breast; stir and and brown slightly. Now add two dozen pitted kalamata olives; a red capsicum cut into strips; ten button mushrooms, halved; a cup of peas and the jar of tomato sauce. Simmer gently for an hour. Cook polenta to instructions, adding parmesan cheese. Spoon into serving bowls. Add chicken stew. Garnish with gremolata. * The school fete? Rides, food stalls including devonshire teas, home-made curries, and gyros; a book stall, a silent auction, lucky dips, a talent quest, and a perfect sunny day with 24 degrees. You can't buy that. William, in a red check shirt and corduroy pants, kicked off the talent quest with, predictably, Hound Dog . In the craft centre Tracy - dressed as a fairy ...

Well, actually, no. I don't recall it ever being that hot on Good Friday. What I do recall is the silence, something even more apparent in recent times when the city never takes a day of rest. I drove to Essendon for an early lunch at the house of a thousand tins, and while the roads were not completely empty, they seemed to be missing that kind of pressing traffic that is always on a mission, tearing off to a supermarket or some other kind of store. On crossing the valley, I usually run into a long, impatient and unyielding northwards line of traffic bound for DFO at Essendon airport. But on Friday everything was closed. I understand why they legislated for seven day trading all those years ago. But a silent suburb beats a herd of black BMWs racing to be first in the single lane entrance to the shopping mall any day. Now it’s once a year instead of one and a half days a week. Enjoy it. Shortly after three in the sultry, silent afternoon. No breeze blew through the open arched d...

Yes, February was always the busiest month and you get fewer days to do it in. And the weather! When I was ten I read Colin Thiele's February Dragon , about as accurate a portrayal of February weather as it gets. Another early read was Ivan Southall's Ash Road published in the early 1960s, and with a darkly prophetic title given the events of 2009. And 1983 and 1967 and other years, for that matter. Do children still read Australian literature or just Andy Griffiths these days? It's all rain into March; but on the last weekend of February we sweltered at the beach. As the sun fell on the Saturday evening, Tracy walked the ti-tree lined slopes with Alexandra reclining in the stroller. They returned. She smiled. I took over. Walked down to the beach. No sleep. Onto the sand where after dinner walkers, many with dogs, were enjoying the sunset. The water was still warm, tide on its way out. Earlier in the day, I had been a couple of hundred metres offshore with the boys o...

He broke out of the water and pushed towards the piling. His brother was already there. They rode up and down on the swell, must have been three or four feet, and wore wetsuits against the crusted mussels and other shells on the piling. They pulled themselves up the ladder and went off the edge of the pier again. Tom surfaced and called out he’d been to the bottom. We were four hundred metres from the shore. The pier was a swarm of people, loose boards rattling under hundreds of feet. Flags were everywhere. People were wearing them. There was even one in the sky, trailing a biplane. The plane flew east and disappeared over Arthur’s Seat. The boys jumped into the water from the lower landing, swam under the pier boards, out again, up the ladder, into the water. A muffled rhythmic whump echoed from the shore. It was three in the afternoon. They pulled off their flippers and we walked down the pier. Away from the water it was hot. The whump from the shore formed itself into a noise fr...

Alexandra, with early morning hair, and books. William at the same age. Thomas, same age.

That’s the end of an era. Two boys at school. Thomas is no longer a pre-schooler; had his school orientation day yesterday, December 6. He doesn’t start officially until February, but he went along for the morning, wearing William’s spare uniform. He had been looking forward to it for weeks. He will be fine at school with the luxury of a brother one class ahead. William was the pioneer, his first weeks at school starting with a huge smile of goodbye at the gate masking wet eyes. We stayed for the principal’s address and walked away and left Thomas around ten o’clock. The morning peak had died and the streets were empty and quiet. Then the church bell tolled, and the sound rumbled across the suburb. Perhaps it was for St Nicholas’ Day. I don’t know. Perhaps they rang it for the new Preps on their orientation morning. Perhaps they were just practising; the bell is being converted to electric operation following restoration of the church after the 2008 fire . * I told the boys th...

Here's William at the same age of fifteen months. Hose off the dirt and you'd mistake one for the other. The hair is identical; Tom's was always straight.

The boys have been trained well and, as we head towards summer, are already asking to dine en plein air . Not that I would use such a pretentious foreign phrase in conversation, much less attribute it to my children; but I must say I do prefer the French version to the cliched al fresco , even though the former refers more correctly to painting. I relented and we ate outside despite several very good objections to the plan, including having no table to sit at and no barbecue coals. The first drawback was fixed by a blanket on the lawn and the second by cooking inside. (The table problem was caused by a very cheap outdoor table purchased from Bunnings cracking after one summer. Perhaps you're supposed to store outdoor tables inside to stop UV damage. To replace it, I'm looking for a cheap old op-shop table instead of wasting more money on plastic that falls apart.) I sliced four red-eye potatoes and fried the slices in a mixture of ghee and oil. These were presented piled hi...

One of the benefits of working from home is that I can pick up the children from school and kindergarten. Last Friday William came out of school with a heavier bag than usual. He pulled out a wrapped package. The wrapped package was a prize in the annual Father's Day raffle. He gave it to me. I opened it. Inside was a bottle of Mt Avoca sauvignon blanc and two carefully boxed crystal wine glasses. In this nanny state era of juvenile warnings on food products and alcohol bottles there is something amusing about a 6-year-old winning a bottle of wine at school. The wine was a 2005 vintage, so someone had had it for a while before donating it for the raffle. Most SB is young and acid, but this had some colour and tasted of butterscotch or something else sweet and rich. Sacher torte? Almond tart? Key lime pie? That's probably closer. We drank it - 'we' meaning Tracy and me - on Sunday night, Father's Day, with pasta with asparagus in a light cream sauce. Nothing sp...

Foghorns could be heard from the bay most of last Sunday, a mournful sound that bounced off the dead flat sea and echoed up the hill. The Port of Melbourne must be a busy place. Everything we buy comes from China and it comes by ship and they don't stop on Sundays. Despite the haze, there was a warmth in the air. In the early afternoon, we went down the hill to the beach. You couldn’t see twenty yards out to sea or up or down the beach. A thick, swirling pale yellow mist was rolling off the water and breaking up through the ti-tree like dry-ice smoke in an amateur stage production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night , assisted in this imagery by continued foghorns. Then the fog was gone, exiting stage south, and the sun came out of the yellow, and the stage was restored to its proper size. Two ships were passing each other on the horizon. The boys were in the water now. Baby Alexandra crept through the sand and down to the water's edge and then straight in, just like her br...

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...

Lunchtime yesterday. I was at the top end of Collins Street trying to walk south and the rain was horizontal, propelled by a gale that was howling straight up the middle like a 1970s Western Oval southerly. It had been raining before the wind came, and the street had been a sea of umbrellas. Suddenly, the wind got up and all the $10 umbrellas blew inside out and snapped their ribs, and someone’s quality one flew up into the plane trees and hung there like a paratrooper landing in a forest. It should be fine if the owner manages to retrieve it. The rain was so intense people had to take refuge in shops. I was outside Harrold’s Gentlemen’s Outfitters and, at the height of the storm, I and four or five others huddled in the entrance set back from Collins Street, and that made the electric doors open, so we stood inside instead, far enough back to let the doors close, and waited for the storm to pass. I amused myself by inspecting the display case nearest the door. Paul Smith driving glo...

On Sunday afternoon, a garden tea party attended by friends and relations was held for William to mark his sixth birthday. The guest of honour wore an argyle-patterned wool vest knitted by his maternal grandmother with a white linen shirt and his favourite red tie, and fawn corduroy trousers. The weather report for Sunday had changed every day last week, variously predicting sun, rain, cool, warmer and dry. Contingency rooms inside had been prepared, but the afternoon turned out merely cloudy, and the sun appeared mid-afternoon, and warmed the gathering. Guests were welcomed at the front gate by Thomas while a gaily-coloured bunting banner flapped in the breeze. The bunting, made by Tracy from neat triangles of vintage fabrics sewn onto white cotton webbing, festooned the front garden all the way from the front right stay of the carport to the trunk of the ornamental pear in front of the lounge room window. The guests included William’s current school friends and kindergarten f...

We drove home late, when the full moon was riding in the sky. It came with us, according to the children. We rolled across the dark hills of Gippsland through shadowy eucalypt forest lit silver by the kaleidoscoping moon. Then the freeway, a Jeffrey Smart painting made three dimensional by John Holland Constructions, the only difference being that these days the paintings are more minimalist than the road, which is littered with oversized artworks. A large black bird pecking at an iron chip. An orange bridge. Then a green one. Then a faux hotel that is just sheer bad taste, like a real hotel. Indeed, they should have built a real one so that the bad taste at least had a purpose, like an Alessi juicer. The moon disappeared and the children slept and then we turned into our short street with the No Through Road sign at the top. The moon slid to a stop just as we did, and sat in the poplars at the end of the street. Look, it came home with us, said William, sleepily. I carried sleepi...

The sun is warm but it comes later in the morning and goes earlier at night. Time moves on. The seasons pass. Children grow. The baby cut a tooth yesterday. William is a schoolboy. Thomas misses him. They were inseparable. Have I ever taken a photo of one without the other half in shot? Thomas learned to swim this summer, had the confidence to climb the diving board at Coburg, dove off in a kind of flat fall, swam to the other side, climbed out. He wore yellow swimmers and yellow flippers and looked like a fat duck. William, not confident enough to dive, called instructions from the side. Some curious children gathered to watch this small muscly boy diving. ‘Who taught you to dive?’ they called. ‘Him,’ lied Thomas, pointing to William; and stood on the end of the board, rocking gently up and down, toes on the edge, arms outstretched, waiting. ‘Tell me when, Winnie,’ he called. The pet name remains from when he could not pronounce the name at twelve months. William paused, then shoute...

Born in June 2005. Started school last Thursday. Blue and navy over grey; black lace-up shoes. Blue hat. 'Do I look like a pilot?' he asked. He did. Flying through life.

It took more than two and a half years to rebuild. Inside, one of Australia's best pipe organs sits in the north transept. One of the first things the fire brigade had done on entering was to throw a tarpaulin about the size of a tennis court over the organ to lessen water damage. Then they put the fire out before the whole place went up. Nice work. Major rebuilding took place in the roof and ceiling . Most of the furnishings - pews, carpet etc - had to be replaced due to water damage. Although the interior is now almost complete, scaffolding fills the apse - the 'east wall' - which in this case really is at the east end of the building. Fabric has been draped over the scaffolding to partially obscure it during services, so that the altar has the appearance of a movie set designed to look like a church. The centre aisle is patterned marble where before there was red carpet. It's a little over the top in design, shines like a mirror and is very echoey. Drop the crysta...