What I Cooked Last Night

2012 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the first Christmas celebrated in my mother's house. She and my father moved into the just-built house during 1952, after spending the first eighteen months of their marriage living in her mother and father's house in Ascot Vale; the second half of that period with a baby. West Essendon was a new suburb then, with nothing farther west except thistle and the Maribyrnong river valley. Over the years Christmas lunch attendance grew as six babies followed the first, receded as grown-up children pulled up roots and ventured overseas, and then grew again when they returned and settled down and had their own families. We all thought the annual Christmas event would eventually become a moveable feast, but it hung on grimly in Deakin Street, staunchly defending moves to extricate it to new surrounds, failing only one year during the innovative '80s when some brave pioneer thought a Christmas picnic at Brimbank Park might be a good idea. Not a...

Sweet potato has been cheap lately. I like it cubed and cooked and turned into a warm salad with torn spinach and segments of vine-ripened tomato and toasted pine nuts, all dressed with a mixture of vinegar, lemon juice, horseradish and a touch of mayonnaise. A large bowl of that makes a meal in itself, if you add a couple of freshly poached eggs and some lightly-toasted batons of Turkish bread. But here’s how I cooked it recently: Sweet potato gnocchi. Peel and chop one Beauregard sweet potato. Boil it until soft. Mash it or press it through a ricer, and place it in a mound on a bread board or marble work bench. Let it cool for ten minutes. Open a bottle of shiraz and pour a glass. Now make a crater in the top of the mound. Crack one egg and the yolk of another into the crater. Using your hands, gradually work in up to half a cup of flour, a scant tablespoonful of polenta and a finely diced clove of garlic. Press and knead the mixture lightly, adding more flour until it hol...

Favourite vegetable? Depends on the season. Right now, as summer sails serenely into the bloom of early middle age, I’m enjoying: • eggplant brushed with garlic-infused olive oil on the outdoor grill at sunset; • zucchini done the same way; • warm salad of sweet potato, toasted macadamias and snipped coriander; • silverbeet cooked with aromatic fenugreek (dried) with a touch of yogurt and chilli flakes swirled through; • potato salad with spring onion and crisped prosciutto tossed over the top; • asparagus not much more than merely blanched then rolled in cracked pepper and dipped in orange-flavoured mayonnaise - snap! crack! zing!; and • Brussels sprouts tossed with butter, pine nuts and chopped chili peppers. Not all at once, of course. Another favourite vegetable is the one that looks like a cross between a duckling and a flying saucer: the yellow button squash. Pasta with vine-ripened tomatoes and button squash Trim and quarter six button squash. (Choose squa...