What I cooked last night.

Home made gnocchi is big in restaurants, but not many people except for Italians seem to make it at home. It's no big deal; just mashed potato bound with flour or eggs. Any number of people will try and complicate it by saying you need potatoes of a certain age or waxiness. I've tried all the theories and no matter what you do the resulting gnocchi are always good. Here's an example , with another link within that post using sweet potato. Last night I made a similar batch, drained them, rolled them in some finely chopped parsley and crumbled some blue cheese over the gnocchi in serving bowls. Then I browned them under the griller and served them, scattering parmesan over the top.

Home made gnocchi makes the manufactured variety taste like footballs. Used footballs. Tough and leathery. Simply fold some flour and an egg through mashed potato, roll into cylinders, flour them and cut them into one-inch lengths. Place on a floured tray until cooking, by dropping them into boiling water. Simple. Never buy the packet ones again, unless you like chewing on old footballs. I made a roux of flour turned through melted butter, added a cup and a half of milk and warmed it on a low heat until thickened. Then I added half a cup of grated cheddar, a large knob of very mature blue cheese and half a cup of parmesan. Add milk if it gets too thick. The resulting bubbling lava was poured over cooked gnocchi which was flecked with chopped parsley and cracked black pepper. The plate was then placed under the griller until the cheese started developing a very appetising golden crust. Probably the finest pasta dish on earth.

NO. 8: CAULIFLOWER There's no getting around it. A cauliflower is a cauliflower. It is not an asparagus spear. It is not a zucchini flower, nor is it a porcini mushroom. It is not a superstar. It is not sexy. As far as vegetables go, cauliflower is Mr Plain, cooked by plain people who happen to be hungry. You could fiddle about with cauliflower and cook in it curries with chickpeas and cashews; or you could impress your dinner party guests by cutting a cauliflower into fancy look-at-me florets, cooking them with tortiglioni and pine nuts and red pepper flakes, and calling it by some regional Italian name that you've dragged out of some cookbook or just made up; but cauliflower, basic as it is, rockets into the Top Ten Vegetables of All Time thanks to one transcendent recipe of perfection: cauliflower cheese. The ultimate vegetable comfort food, a dish that was a smash hit the first time cauliflower and cheese collided, possibly by accident, cauliflower cheese is outstandi...

After cheese mac, the world's second favourite comfort food - according to a recent authoritative survey of two people - is meatballs. When you add cheese to the recipe, the desirability of the recipe reaches stratospheric levels. Dishes such as these were frowned upon for years but, recently, 'experts' have decided that cholesterol is no longer harmful. All that wasted energy avoiding cholesterol has probably cause stress-based heart disease in millions of people. So the biggest health tip of all is: never listen to health bureaucrats' warnings. Meatballs with cheddar and mushrooms. Place a large fist-sized ball of pork and veal mince into a large mixing bowl and, with your hands, fold into it two or three very finely chopped button mushrooms, half a cup of grated cheddar, half a very finely diced small zucchini, one very finely chopped spring onion, a chopped clove of garlic, a dash of Worcestershire sauce, a tablespoonful of oatmeal, a sprinkling of polenta and a...

It's a hard life being a gourmet foodie. Or is one of those words redundant? The trick is to be the first to get on to something new and exclusive, and then drop it like a week-old meme when the mainstream discovers it. For example, God forbid a supermarket - a discount supermarket - should win an exclusive cheese show award. An award? Aldi won eight gold, 41 silver and picked up Best Contributor at Royal Sydney - in its first attempt . Looks like the old stagers have been resting on their limburgers. Uproar and outrage ensued. Pointedly, the ABC accompanied its story with a picture of a housewife pushing a trolley out of an Aldi store with her toddler in tow - he probably eats Bega Bar-B-Cubes! or Cheestiks! The Age went typically pseudo-intellectual, wheeling out a cheesemaker's take on cultural identity: Perhaps the decision to award Aldi the lion's share of produce medals for dairy this year is simply a fitting acknowledgement of a seismic shift in how we con...

Once upon a time, this blog started a campaign to promote the maligned Brussels sprout. The campaign has rolled on, relentlessly, like a Capricorn Dancer wave (after the horses). I just don’t talk about it much. The other night, I made this side dish to accompany grilled steaks. It was a particularly cold and bleak late-autumn evening, one on which strong, robust flavours appeal. Brussels sprouts with bacon and blue cheese Trim the ends off a dozen Brussels sprouts and halve them. Peel one onion and quarter it. Plunge sprouts and the onion into boiling water and cook them fifteen minutes. Fry three slices of short bacon, diced, until not quite crisp. I always add a little white wine and pepper to the pan. Drain vegetables. Add to cooked bacon with a tablespoon of sour cream. Stir to coat. Remove to a heatproof serving bowl or platter. Crumble gorgonzola or other blue cheese over the top. Grill three minutes. Serve with medium-rare eye fillet steaks. Pour a glass of red...

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...

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...

Late one night. Home from work in an office in the city by train that was late and dirty and full of those newspapers they give to commuters to stare vacantly at while they ride the rails back to suburbia, and then strew on the floor as they get off at Ginifer or Alamein or Mount Waverley or Mooroolbark. They call it Mx , but it's just tomorrow's Herald Sun without the Terry McCrann column. Close to midnight. But you have to eat. I turned on the radio. There are two classical music stations. Sometimes they play classical music. Other times the ABC one plays endless audience applause while the announcer draws out his vowels, ABC-style, and gushes. It sounds like a live weather report. Over at MBS the announcer tells you the composer's life story and then plays a two-minute minuet. I rolled the dial to an oldies station. Pasta shells with tuna, cheese and peas. I set a pot of water on the stove and salted it and threw in a few drops of oil and lit the burner. Yawn. ...

We're eating boats for dinner, boys, I told them. Sailing ships filled with cargo. I hope they don't sink. We fetched the boats from the pantry. They were large pasta shells about two inches from bow to stern. They were 24 of them. I boiled them and drained them and put them in cold water. To fill them, we needed 500g spinach, 500g fresh ricotta, 100g mozzarella, 50g parmesan, two eggs, a good dash of nutmeg and three cloves of garlic. I melted the spinach: took a bunch of it, rinsed it, placed it in a pan with the water it held after rinsing, threw in a dash of olive oil and a scored clove of garlic, put the lid on the pan and heated the spinach slowly until it turned to green mush. Then I mixed the spinach with the ingredients in the third paragraph in a large bowl along with a gust of salt and a gale of pepper. Then we loaded up the boats to their upper foredecks. That was fun, especially for the boys. There was ricotta mixture on the ceiling. How did that get there...