What I Cooked Last Night

I guess you'd have to call this a salad, as in potato salad, but it doesn't look like salad. But it is delicious. Peel and cube a sweet potato, boil it until tender but not falling apart. Boil an ear or two of sweet corn (in season, plentiful and cheap right now), strip the corn and toss it together with the boiled sweet potato. Add your favourite dressing and toss chopped parsley and toasted pine nuts over it in generous amounts. Good with grilled steaks.

No, I didn't cook it. Someone else did. Well, all right, I made the salad. Back home after camping, what's the first thing that occurs to you to eat after a week of juggling pots on a single-burner camp stove? Yes! Your favourite take-out! We have this seafood place close by that does calamari and fish packs to die for and they charge next to nothing for it. A pack of ten calamari rings, superbly battered and deep-fried perfectly crisp and golden - with enough chips for two - is $4.25, while the extremely generous fish fillets are the same price complete with a heap of chips, tartare sauce and a couple of lemon wedges. Sometimes they even throw an extra piece of fish. So that's $8.50 and there's way more than enough for two. Can't do better than that. I knocked up a quick salad of lettuce, tomatoes, onion rings and olives in a vinegar dressing to go with it. Tender calamari, fresh battered whiting, chips and a couple of cold Cascades and you're in...

Friday 16 January Food always tastes better outdoors, so we took off on a hot morning for a camping trip, aiming for the East Gippland coast. First stop was for lunch in a park in one of the towns off the main highway to Gippsland. Sat in the shade of a huge tree with tuna, olives, cheese, turkish bread, fruitcake and coffee. Afternoon tea saw us having cold beers in a shady beer garden at a hotel in Sale, commercial centre of East Gippsland. Nearing coastal Loch Sport around 5pm, ominous grey clouds gathered. Another twenty minutes and it was raining heavily and thunder was cracking. So back inland, frantically twiddling the radio in search of a forecast. Sure enough, the weather improved and in 30 minutes we were pitching our tent in glorious sunshine in a camping ground back in Sale. We found a fish shop minutes before closing time and the woman sold us a massive piece of Ling. In a pan on the single-burner camp stove, I sizzled some onions, curry, coriander and pepp...

The requiem mass was at ten o'clock on an extremely hot day at the old red brick church where Poppy was married so many years ago. An organist pedalled away churning out all the old favourites. The sun bore down relentlessly at the cemetery and then afterwards, everyone gathered for lunch or afternoon tea, I forget what time it was - cold chicken sandwiches, egg and lettuce sandwiches, ham sandwiches, cold roast beef and mustard sandwiches, platters of cold meat and cheese, small cakes, biscuits, scones, gallons of hot tea and cold beer. Old friends and infrequently encountered relatives exchanged news and swore they would keep in closer touch.

At age 98, a month before his 99th year, Poppy went to heaven. A tower of strength and a tower of wisdom and wit, the patriarch of the family, the godfather. Always with the funny quip, always with the kind word, always the enquiry after your own, right up until the end. That's the markof a true gentleman, a rarity in a a world in which everyone else talks about themselves. Three days before Christmas, and a day after attending two Christmas parties and being showered with gifts by all the other seniors, especially the ladies. So Christmas was subdued but a time for memories, all good. None bad. And for the first time in many years, no special passenger accompanied me on my car trip to the family Christmas lunch. Just five Christmases ago it was two special passengers, this year none. So no chicken, no curry, no salad, no ham, no plum pudding, no cake, no shortbread, no wine, no coffee. No after dinner witticism about being 'hors de combat'. And no rid...

I dunno why it's called Caesar salad (I've heard the reason but I forget), I dunno what the right recipe is, whether it has bacon, whether it should have croutons, whether the eggs should be hard, soft, crumbled, whatever. I just make it every now and again, and I make it different every time. Last night we were given cos from the school garden, so: Rinse the cos, chop it in broad sections and arrange (or throw) in a large salad bowl. Fry some bacon, chopped into small pieces, until crisp. Or until not crisp, doesn't matter, however you like. Boil a couple of eggs. I boiled mine hard. Toss the cooked bacon over the cos. Slice the eggs into sections and place over the cos - that's what I did. Or crumble them and do the same. Make your favourite dressing. I already had some vinaigrette left in the fridge so I put half a teaspoon of mayo in it, added a little lemon juice and some salt and pepper, shook it up and poured it over. Then I sprinkled a s...

I dunno what you call them. Leftover blueye (about half a kilo) and leftover mashed potato means yummy fish burgers for lunch next day. Flake the fish and blend it with the mash with half a cup of flour (I used rice flour because Tracy is having a wheat free stage except when visiting cafes and eating muffins), and egg and salt and pepper. Fry the burgers in a general amount of olive oil (you might prefer a lighter oil) until crispy. Turn over and fry the other side. If you've formed the burgers well, they don't break. If they do, you've formed them badly. No matter, just break 'em up and turn it into fish hash. Yum. When your burgers are cooked, set them on a plate and serve with warm tomato sauce and a squeeze of lemon over the top and a nice green salad on the side.

Fresh from the Victoria Market, Blue Eye cutlets. With mashed potato and green peas. This is a great Friday night meal, simply and homely. We had an entree of mango, green olive and fetta wrapped in prosciutto. Beautiful. The fish grilled in butter and olive oil to a crisp finish. Chilled white wine. Yum. Sleep.

The other night I didn't cook at all. The temperature was in the high thirties (celsius) so we had take-outs from Singh's Indian take-aways, one of the best around. When they opened about fifteen years ago, their vindaloo was so hot people couldn't eat, so they toned it down for local tastes, but you can still order it cranked up if you wish. The guy who ran Singh's used to bring out people from India to cook and ran into a bit of trouble with the Immigration Department for using illegal migrants. They sure were the genuine item. The food was sensational. I hadn't been to Singh's for quite a while, but I remembered what to order: mulligatawny, that hot, seedy, delicious Raj soup creation; Alu Chap, which is curried peas encased in mashed potato and deep fried; a beef vindaloo; a garlic naan and some pappadums. The mulligatawny was redder and more dahl-like than I remember; we slice the alu chap in two and pour the mulligatawny over the top. Yum. The...

The fluid, gravy, jus, mess, whatever you want to call it, left over from the beef and red wine stew below made a very nice ragu with the addition of a can of tomatoes and some frozen peas. Dead simple. Cook it all up and serve it over pasta. Or you can just cook it into some risotto. Equally delicious.

Following my immutable law about buying only what is in season or plentiful, I found some beef on the bone at $6 a kilo. I made a very simple stew with red wine, garlic, a little butter, onions, carrots and potatoes, letting it cook away for a couple of hours until the meat fell off the bone. Then I served it with braised red cabbage (there's plenty of that left in the garden - my family will be getting red cabbages for Christmas) and big gluggy egg noodles - yum. Kind of Alsace style I guess, where French meets German. Goes well with beer. Of course.

The garden is exploding with several varieties of lettuce, broad beans, the last of the broccoli and more. I can't eat fast enough. Take a salad bowl the size of a truck steering wheel and fill it with lettuce, quartered cold boiled potatoes, blanched broccoli, boiled broad beans, quartered hardboiled eggs, olives, rings of salad onion and crown it with a can of tuna and your dressing. (I used a simple, lemon, vinegar, olive oil and a touch of mayo.) Beautiful with fresh bread and a glass of cold white wine. Tomatoes not ready yet so I didn't use any. This salad needs good tomatoes and is insulted with inferior supermarket tomatoes. The lesson is, if it's not good, leave it out.

Take your left over corned beef - you had some left over? Why? - dice it into small pieces, mix it with mashed potato and a little chopped parsley. That's corned beef hash. Now the fun starts. You can add all sorts of things to it. Add heaps of butter and beat it until it glistens. Man that hash is sinfully delicious. Add some mustard for a real taste kick. Add tomato sauce for a reddish hash with a bit of bite. Or worcestershire sauce. Or HP sauce. Add some boiled cabbage for colcannon-like creation. Or leeks. Turn it into hash cakes by frying it up in oil or butter. Superb.

Slice it finely. Rinse it if it is gritty, this normally at the top where it pushes through the earth. Fry some bacon, diced finely, in a little olive oil. Add the leeks after a couple of minutes and a dash of water or white wine. Cover tightly and cook until soft over a very low heat, adding a dash more fluid if it starts to dry out. Keep it nice and moist but not 'wet'. Then add a can of butter beans or some you have cooked. Season and serve as a side dish to a roast, a grill or a barbecue. Great with beer, as is anything involving bacon, beans or leeks. Variation: add cooked cubed potatoes to bulk it out as a main meal.