What I Cooked Last Night

That headline alone has enough appetite appeal to get you salivating. The dish itself is even better. Chop a leek lengthwise twice, and then slice the lengths to get quartered rings. Chop a red capsicum into small squares and add the leek and capsicum to a pan with a scored clove of garlic, a dash of white wine, a little olive oil, and lots of pepper. Simmer fifteen minutes. Check fluid level and adjust with more wine. Meanwhile, cook pasta shells. When the leek and capsicum are cooked and the wine has almost evaporated, add a sliced avocado, a dessertspoon of home made pesto and half a cup of cream, and simmer until cream reduces. Drain the pasta shells. This is difficult and annoying. The shells hold the water. Persist. You do not want watered-down pasta sauce. Spoon creamy vegetables sauce over pasta, add shaved parmesan cheese and toasted pine nuts. Glass of shiraz.

Reed avocadoes are coming into season. Possibly the most voluptuous fruit of all, they are big and almost round; and when ripe, they bulge with creamy young flesh. Are they ready to eat? Cup one in your hand and squeeze ever so gently. I almost regret not including the avocado in my top ten vegetables list (the rule being that if it is used like a vegetable, it is given honorary vegetable status, even though it is a fruit). Last night I made this sensuous* pasta dish using a Reed avocado, a leek and a red capsicum, all of which are plentiful and cheap right now. Rigatoni with avocado, leek and red capsicum. I chopped a leek lengthwise twice, and then across the grain to make quartered rings. Then I chopped a red capsicum into small batons. I placed the leek and capsicum in a pan with a scored clove of garlic, a dash of white wine, a little olive oil, and lots of pepper, and set it on a low heat to steam the vegetables in the wine. Meanwhile, I cooked the rigatoni. When th...

Cook half a 500g pack of linguine. Approximately three minutes before pasta is done, add a cup of broccoli florets and a few sticks of asparagus chopped into one-inch batons. A minute later, add a cup of snow peas. Drain. While pasta is cooking, warm through two chopped garlic cloves in olive oil in another pan, then add half a cup of sliced button mushrooms, an avocado sliced into segments, a good shake of black pepper and half a cup of white wine. Cover and cook gently for three minutes. Remove lid, add a tablespoonful or more of cream. Reduce. Drain pasta and green vegetables and place into serving bowls. Pour creamy mushroom and avocado sauce over. Add parmesan and chopped parsley.

Late in the evening, an almost empty larder turns up a can each of red kidney beans and diced tomatoes. Not a lot you can do with that. Let's see. Spice can fix anything. * Heat the kidney beans and diced tomatoes gently in a pot. Add a teaspoon of paprika, half that each of cummin powder, salt and chili flakes - or a little less of chili powder. Cook and reduce a little. Take an avocado - I had one in the refrigerator where it possibly should not be stored - slice and add to bean mixture to heat through. In another pot, cook some polenta. When done, place polenta in a bowl, add bean stew, top with sour cream, grated cheddar and splash on some chili sauce. I used Tabasco Habanero. The stuff is delicious. You can drip it on just about anything. Tick, tock, midnight. Must go shopping tomorrow. The cupboard is bare. * The end of eastern summer time has this household's body clock in confusion. The children are waking at 4.30 a.m. for breakfast and demanding lunch at ni...

It was well after eight on a Saturday night. My mother-in-law was here for dinner so I wanted something fast but impressive, easy but interesting, simple but appetising. So I went to the kebab shop. No, I didn’t. I might have wanted to, but instead I sliced a large chicken breast fillet into one-centimetre cubes, placed these in a pan with a close-fitting lid over half a tablespoon of olive oil and a sliced garlic clove, sloshed in half a glass of white wine and the cubed flesh of an avocado and set the pan on a low heat to poach the chicken and warm the avocado through. Then I drank the other half of the glass of wine. Fresh angel hair pasta, six little bunches from Donnini’s, was already cooking in a large pan in salted, oiled water. When the pasta was a minute away from done, I threw in ten asparagus spears I had sliced in three pieces each, and a good handful of snow peas. I shook the poaching pan and, with tongs, turned over a few cubes of reluctant chicken. It shouldn’t sti...

The late summer air was still simmering. It was after seven. I put the charcoal in a pile in the grate and put a match to it in three places and left it to consume itself and turn white hot. That would take forty minutes and in those forty minutes I would make a salad of roasted pumpkin cubes, avocado, rocket, toasted macadamias, chick peas and shards of feta cheese dressed with olive oil and lemon juice; set the outside table; walk inside several times and out again forgetting what I had gone in for; and pour a large balloon glass full of red wine that was almost black and seductive with the fragrance of something you read about in wine columns. Blackberries? American oak? French barriques? I don’t know, but it was nice. Forty-five minutes later I placed the first item on the grill: a piece of ling swimming in a marinade of soy, ginger, a clove of garlic and a chopped spring onion and wrapped in foil. We sat and watched the show. It started on time as usual. Two legs stepped out o...

I'd never grown snow peas before. Last year in the front garden bed we had a row of carrots. They didn't grow, and they took all winter to do it. They sulked and took up space that could have yielded something more useful than hard orange sticks good only for horses to chew. My fault of course. Probably didn't feed them enough. I'd heard of horse carrots when I was a child. Always wondered what they were. (Always wondered what those warning signs on the back of horse floats meant, as well. Caution horses , the signs used to read. I asked my father. He told me they were very careful horses, never bucked or shied.) So no more carrots. (And never believe your father when he has a smile playing about his lips.) We planted snow peas in winter instead. They grew, and they started sprouting snow peas a month ago. The vine winds about a simple three-sided pyramid of three stakes meeting at the top. The pods come out and dangle like earrings, or decorations on a Christmas tr...

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...

So that was Islands in the Stream , about which an anecdote: I was standing by the counter at the bookstore and the attendant said Can I help you by raising one eyebrow at me and not speaking. So I saved some words as well and said " Islands in the Stream ?" with a questioning upward inflection at the end. He disappeared for a little while and came back and held out a CD with a lopsided smile. "Track four." "Ah yes," I said, "I liked Kenny Rogers but I did find Dolly Parton's ..." Now he was raising his other eyebrow. "I found Dolly Parton’s voice a little unexpected," I went on, "Kind of like Neil Sedaka's voice coming out of Pavarotti." That left him flat-footed. So I bored on. "Actually, it wasn’t the CD I was looking for. It was the book. You can’t get it anywhere. Hemingway. Dymock’s didn’t have a single Hemingway title on the shelves. They had about a million Gordon Ramsay cookbooks and a whole ...