What I Cooked Last Night

Monday's Moreland Leader reports : Coles is looking to increase parking spaces at its Coburg North Village after a flood of visitors in its first month overwhelmed existing facilities. Coles spokeswoman Martine Alpins said customer numbers exceeded expectations. "We plan to increase the number of parking spaces in the coming weeks to ensure customers continue to have a great shopping experience ... " And are able actually to take their shopping home. Unfortunately, some bureaucrats believe that shops would sell more goods if customers did not drive to the shops . How would they get their purchases home? Teleportation? Sydney Road traders would experience an increase in ... spending in their stores if on-street parking was removed, a community wellbeing expert says. Dr Hannah Badland, a McCaughey VicHealth Centre senior research fellow, said research had shown limiting car parking resulted in people staying longer in shopping strips and making more purchases. A chasm the...

It was on a can of pineapple in the supermarket. It read: Naturally Low in Fat , as if to reassure the one in eighty billion shoppers who might think pineapple was as fat-laden as, say, a ham and cheese croissant or a jar of double cream. What next? Naturally Low in Nuts on a leg of lamb? Completely Sugar Free! on a jar of salt?

Sometimes you can't help overhearing conversations. Even one-way ones. Occasionally the one-way ones are even more interesting, because having to imagine the unheard replies makes you listen even closer. It was late morning on a warm, overcast autumn day. I stood at the checkout queue by the customer service desk at the Rye store of one of the two major supermarkets. While I waited I daydreamed out the front window towards the beach across the road. A voice behind the service desk brought my attention back inside. It was a middle-aged staff member, talking on the phone, obviously to the store manager. She looked flustered. "A customer is coming to see you. She was here about an hour ago. She bought about six bags of shopping," the staff member was saying. "She rang the store a few minutes ago. I answered the phone. I've just hung up. She wants to bring it all back." Pause. It was the manager's turn to speak. The staff lady again: "Everyth...

Two Coles supermarket face each other across Waterfield Street. Two hundred metres away is a Woolworths. A couple of weeks ago, NQR opened next door to Woolworths. Coles and Woolworths sell 825g Australian-produced tinned fruit for $3.65 to $4.99, or imports from Thailand or China (but sometimes elsewhere) for $1.50 to $1.60. NQR sells Australian tinned fruit produced for the export market, but recalled or cancelled, for $1.49. Some commentators and politicians want the ACCC to examine the duopoly's role in reducing competition. Looks like NQR is doing the job with no cost to the taxpayer.

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...

It’s that time of year. Drumroll: basil arrives in the garden. After last year’s basil had gone to seed, I had placed the stalks in a paper bag in the shed and, six months later, scattered the dried seeds about the garden. It’s hit and miss. You never know where seedlings will come up. But when they do they are bulletproof. Neither heat wave nor snail can stop a rampaging basil plant. * It’s a retail relic; an artefact of days gone by. It should be listed in Carter’s guide to 1950s collectables. What is it? It’s the deli section at Piedimonte’s. It cannot last, of course. Piedimonte’s deli hangs on grimly to its customer base of elderly Italian and Greek immigrants who still refuse to shop where their children now do; at the thousands of Coles and Woolworths hypermarkets spreading across the country like an army of freeze-dried mediocrity. Piedimonte’s cannot compete with Coles and Woolworth’s, but its deli makes the Coles and Woolworths equivalents look like pig troughs of bulk pa...

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.)

Welcome back to At My Table 's Neil who writes of a waiter, when asked for the name of a particular variety of French mustard, returns from checking the name on the jar to announce, "It's called moutarde!" Reminds me of the Coles checkout girl who, when scanning a parsnip for my pot of winter vegetable soup a few months ago, enthused: "Wow! A white carrot! How long have they been around?"