What I Cooked Last Night

Cook pasta - spaghetti is ideal for this olio e aglio -style recipe. Toss spaghetti in a little olive oil. Cut up a dozen anchovies into small pieces. Cut a fresh chilli into very small rings. Toss anchovies and chilli through the spaghetti. This simple dish packs an amazing flavour punch. It's been on high rotation here for years. * I saw a man gazing up into the tree. It was him: the council arborist. "It will have to come down," he said, continuing to gaze at the tree. "But not because of the mistletoe," he went on, confirming the theory, "But because prunus is prone to borers which weaken the forks, and it's too close to the wires anyway." We'll have a new prunus in a couple of weeks. I have a particular fondness for prunus: my mother's street used to be lined with mature trees, and in August they would put on a show. When visiting at night I would turn into the street at the bottom of the hill, flick the headlights onto hig...

Lamb shanks were a winter staple when I was growing up. When walking home from school on cold winter afternoons, I came to love the soupy redolence of lamb, carrot, celery, onion and barley rolling across the suburb like an aromatic fog. Everyone made lamb shank soup! There was nothing like that smell. * Six days to the winter solstice, so I’ve dragged this recipe out of the archive. Right now we need something robust, homely, and crammed with flavour. Lamb, rosemary, and a bottle of red. (Important note: the bottle of red wine in the title is an ingredient, so you’ll need to buy two if you plan to actually drink some.) Rosemary comes to the fore in this highly aromatic dish that will blanket the neighbourhood with tantalising aromas of lamb braising in red wine with herbs and garlic. (Is garlic also a herb?) In a plastic bag, dust six lamb shanks with a tablespoon of flour and salt and pepper. Brown the seasoned shanks in olive oil in a large heavy pot in batches. Remov...

It rained all day, and it was cold, and I walked down a sodden Sydney Road late morning and visited the fish shop and one of the two greengrocers; and brought home a dozen oysters, two swordfish steaks, a bag of very good green beans and the last decent tomatoes in Australia. * Early in the afternoon, I visited a friend who was housebound following a hip operation - he will never run another marathon - and drank coffee while his dogs leapt about the small lounge room in which we sat. We listened to the rain outside, and then another noise started. The endless rain, having obviously pooled on the roof, was trickling through the vents of a wall-mounted heater and was dripping on the carpet behind the television with a loud patting noise; drips of slow destruction, water torture for apartment-dwellers, a slow insistent reminder to call the body corporate who would call a plumber who would fix the problem in due course, perhaps June, perhaps July, perhaps never. My friend hobbled to th...

I don't know if these recipes are repeated. I don't have an index or a contents page or labels or tabs or a like button or a follow-me-on-twitter thing with a bird-with-outstretched-wings logo, as if twitter lets you break free of the multitudes and soar alone in a soundless, soaring space where you hear nothing but your own wings beating the air ... Didn't someone make a record about that once?* Now the bird imagery is used to drag millions of humans down into a kind of subterranean worldwide typing pool where they issue forth messages not much longer than the grunting of cavemen, and some of their grunts make the front pages of newspapers. Nuts. But then I got dragged into it, because I had to write some tweets for clients. They couldn’t even do their own grunting! So I set up an account - "Instantly connect! Follow your friends and your favourite celebrities!" - to see how it worked. Apparently it’s not about character count (140) but message byte lengt...

The other night I made a simple pasta dish of spaghetti with garlic, olive oil, anchovies and finely chopped fresh chili. It needed something on the side. I did not have leaves of any kind so I made a salad out of some items that just happened to be there. The salad got out of control. It turned into the main event. Warm salad of roasted pumpkin, fennel, avocado and kidney beans. I had some leftover oven-roasted pumpkin and a head of fennel that resembled a miniature bagpipes. There were a few other potential ingredients vying for inclusion. How to bring them together? Here's how: Chop the fennel into manageable pieces. It will fall into an array of j-curves and other fantastic three-dimensional shapes, allowing you to marvel at the geometry of nature while you construct a mega-salad. Re-heat the cooked pumpkin if you want a ‘warm’ salad; otherwise, add it to the salad straight from the fridge. Open one can of kidney beans. Drain. Halve and section one avocado (relati...

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...

It was a hot Easter and we were in the same small country town in the same green hills of Gippsland. There is almost no flat ground in this town. All the houses are on slopes and the slope down which the boys rolled their boiled eggs for the annual egg roll was steeper than you'd like; and the eggs tumbled out of sight, gathering speed, and the boys laughed and ran and fell on their faces on the soft green grass chasing them down the hill. * Sunday lunch was a picnic at Tarago overlooking the river where it is dammed. It was a hot day and we got there early and we won the double: a table under cover of trees, close to an electric barbecue. Grandmother and aunts and uncles hauled in shiploads of fare in old-fashioned tartan coldboxes and someone threw a large cloth over the table, obscuring the timber slat table, so that the wine and beer glasses were falling over all afternoon until you learned to find a flat spot underneath the cloth. I drove the barbecue. You had to press th...