What I Cooked Last Night

From today's Herald Sun: While their meat doughnuts completely reimagined this humble snack - paprika sugar-rolled fluffy dough balls with a savoury meat centre - (and which a pork version thereof is also the must-order snack at the very fun Two Wrongs in South Yarra) the "milk and cookies" to finish at Dexter in Preston is a rudely clever, stupidly tasty full stop to a meal. Second prize goes to the same review: This "cheese" course, where a glossy-sheened smoked croissant is served with a round of what appears to be camembert that's actually cauliflower, oozing like ripe cheese, is wildly smart and inventive.

"Please prove you are not a robot."

From the weekend vacant position ads, a job at one of Australia's leading schools, PLC: Director of Innovation The Director of Innovation will develop and execute the vision to re-conceptualise library; space, staff and services, to create an Innovation Centre at PLC. The position plays a strategic and transformational role by providing opportunities for creativity and entrepreneurship through developing innovative and inviting spaces and a range of experiences that delight and engage students and staff as well as offering community building experiences with the wider PLC community. Just read that last sentence again. It is a masterpiece of the genre; an over-long piece of jargon-riddled bureaucrat-speak devoid of any real meaning. Who do they want? An architect? A painter? A set designer? A performance artist? Who knows. Probably they don't, either. On it goes: The incumbent (sic – but they mean the appointee) will ensure the delivery of information learning and literary serv...

The Australian's Wish magazine rents out its expensive pages to world famous brands in return for advertorial articles. It pays to get these right. The latest print edition commences a story on one of Italy's oldest prestige eyewear manufacturer thus: For its latest collection, the Italian eyewear brand Persil has gone for a vintage look ... I'd be asking for my money back if I were Mr Persol.

Oyster blade is overlooked. It is already cheap but is often marked down because nobody buys it. Don't people make stews any more? (And why does the spell check underline squiggle thing want me to join 'any' and 'more' as one word? They are not.) Here's one recipe that can turn a cheap cut of meat into something special: In a heavy pan – I use a heavy cast iron skillet that retains heat – cook a large chopped onion in olive oil. Remove when done and in the same pan, brown the meat, cut into large cubes, in more olive oil. Give it a few shakes of black pepper and one or two of salt. Then sprinkle the meat, while turning, with flour so that the meat is coated. Place meat and onions in a casserole. Cut two medium carrots into rounds. Trim a dozen button mushrooms. Chop a stick of celery into half-inch diagonals. Put these vegetables into the heavy pan, cover it and let them sweat in the pan's retained heat for a few minutes over a very low flame so that t...

Yesterday I walked into a room, and there were no elephants in there.

The West Australian reports : Senator Ludwig is meeting MLA (Meat and Livestock Australia) representatives today, but the organisation faces more grilling at a Senate inquiry. Bumbling Minister Ludwig, who would be as popular on a cattle station right now as Small Business Minister Sherry in a bookshop, won't wear the blame : He said the buck stopped with the MLA.

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams. - The Cloud by Percy Bysshe Shelley iCloud stores your content and wirelessly pushes it to all your devices. And because it seamlessly integrates with your apps, everything happens automatically - iCloud by Apple Corporation

Building the Education Revolution : first, spend billions on libraries, then throw out the books: ENGLISH teachers have questioned the value of a stand-alone literature course in the national curriculum for years 11 and 12 in an "increasingly media-driven and digital society". They could give up on literature and teach jargon instead. They are very good at it: "Key considerations will focus on whether, in an increasingly media-driven and digital society, a stand-alone literature course is the most appropriate focus for the final two years of formal school study and indeed whether the suite of courses proposed is sufficiently forward looking," the association says. "Sufficiently forward looking" ? With language like that, they shouldn't even be in the classroom. ETANSW executive officer Eva Gold said the English courses "tend to privilege print medium" over digital and multi-media texts. Never let a 14-line sonnet get in the way of a 14...

On page three in the Aldi catalogue that fell out of my letterbox on Saturday morning: Beef Rump Steak, $9.99kg. These rump steaks are the perfect cut to throw on the barbecue with friends ... I’ll stick with chilli sauce, thanks. (I really must cut back that pelargonium. It is covering the No Junk Mail sign.)

A tabloid liftout entitled 'Dream Houses' in one of the weekend papers described a property by the sea as a 'luxury-ladened beach house' .

"Cynthia opened the oven door and poured more hot gravy over the roast before lambasting Roger following an argument about a mint sauce recipe. Did it contain sugar, or not? They ran a successful real estate empire of eighty offices between them, but could never agree about the smallest things."

One-inch pillows of fresh salmon, poached ever so gently in a little wine and garlic. Strips of avocado added to warm through. Egg noodles cooked until just done, drained and draped in ringlets on white plates. Salmon pillows and avocado strips placed in little cairns on the pasta. A little cream in the pan juices, reduced in the wine with salt and pepper and poured over each dish. A large glass of cold chardonnay, glinting yellow in the gathering dusk. The first outdoor evening meal of spring has to be special and it was. * We had an afternoon tea for Thomas's birthday; crustless sandwiches, and small open pastries filled with lightly beaten egg and tiny bacon squares and shards of spring onion. And tea: my favourite Earl Grey. * I'd been discussing euphemisms earlier in the day with a teacher. Teachers know all about euphemisms. They have to use them. It's enforced by Education Department bureaucrats. We had been discussing reports in the news of students ...

The sky has dripped for days with the kind of precipitation that wets everything without making an impression on the gauge. You could hardly call it rain. When it rained a few weeks ago, in the evening, I sat in the day room - the one that overlooks the back garden - for a while just to hear the sound of it beating on the iron roof. That room is an extension added in the 1950s to the original 1948 roofline. Rain on an iron roof is music. Until it leaks. * Everything seems to have stopped. Against the grey sky the trees are black fretwork bending to a cold, raw northerly. The lawn has returned but I haven't mown it for months. It's winter’s last gasp. Look closer. Everything is in bud. All waiting, tense, silent, like sprinters on the blocks of an Olympic final. Next month, the gun will go off. Until then the buds lie in wait. Of course, the magnolias are running a different race. Bare a few weeks back, they are now loaded with hundreds of absurdly large flowers from pi...

A COLD, STERILE MEETING ROOM IN A LARGE INNER CITY PRIMARY SCHOOL. EVENING. SIX PEOPLE AROUND A TABLE, A SHEET OF A4 IN FRONT OF EACH: THE AGENDA. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TABLE IS A RUBBLE OF PUBLICATIONS AND DEPARTMENTAL REPORTS. AN ELECTRIC CLOCK ON THE WALL HAS JUST WHIRRED PAST EIGHT. HAROLD (COMMITTEE CHAIR AND PRINCIPAL): Thanks for coming, everyone. GEORGETTE (COMMITTEE SECRETARY): Thanks, Harold, but most of us didn’t actually come; we’ve been here since the last class of the day writing reports. HAROLD (LAUGHS): Me too! Now. Where do we start? GEORGETTE: The motto, I think. ANNE (NEW COMMITTEE MEMBER): Is that the mission statement? GEORGETTE: No, the mission statement is the ten paragraphs in the inside front cover of the school annual. ANNE (PICKING UP AND FLICKING THROUGH A HEAVY PAPERBACK A4 PUBLICATION): Oh, that one. I thought that was our five-year plan. HAROLD: That’s something else again. The five-year plan is essentially the strategy to implement the mis...

I went out to the letterbox and fished out the mail. There was an insurance bill. It was heavy. I tore it open. A book fell out. Terms and conditions. One hundred and seventy-seven pages. Gloss cover in heavy stock. Perfect bound. Insane. They don't call it terms and conditions any more. They call it a 'product disclosure statement'. With capitals. To make it sound important. Now, let me see. What could they have usefully fitted between the front and back covers? The Postman Always Rings Twice , by James Cain? You'd get that in almost twice. Albert Camus' The Stranger ? Conrad's Heart of Darkness ? Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby ? James' Washington Square ? Animal Farm by George Orwell? Lawrence's The Virgin and the Gypsy ? Easy. Most of those novels have chapters, of course, meaning plenty of blank pages; but this product disclosure statement just ploughed along, type falling on page after page like a concertinaed train wreck. ...

The colour ad in the magazine that fell out of the weekend newspaper was the usual cliched rubbish designed and written by a creative team earning $300,000 p.a. between them. A stupid-looking man (they have to look stupid, or the casting agency won't cast them for the job) wearing oversized pink rubber gloves was standing in front of a kitchen sink full of bubbles as if wondering what a kitchen sink was and why he was standing in front of it wearing a pair of oversized pink rubber gloves. Advertising cliche #2,143. The ad declared that Bosch dishwashers used a fraction of the water used by obviously stupid people who refuse to buy a dishwasher. It then went on to quote 'research' supposedly showing that while the dishwasher used 15 litres, the amount used by the human dish-washer to wash the same number of dishes was 103 litres on average. 103 litres?????!!!!! On average? (I hardly ever use multiple exclamation marks, let alone question marks, so this better be good...