What I Cooked Last Night

I posted my first asparagus recipe for spring. Now here's the second. Boil the tender, juicy, green spears until soft enough to your liking in water with a generous squeeze of lemon juice. Drain, place on plate, sprinkle with crumbled blue vein cheese, capers, cracked pepper and a dash of vinaigrette dressing. Eat with buttered bread rolls for lunch in the early spring sunshine, watching the leaves coming out on the magnolia as the last winter blooms fade. And a glass of chardonnay to toast the warmer days ahead.

It's here! The first asparagus of the season have arrived. Actually, the first ones arrived about two weeks ago, but they were too expensive. Now they're here in greater numbers and the price has stabilised. So - how to eat the first asparagus of spring? Made a kind of salad, a bit like a nicoise, bed of lettuce, some boiled baby potatoes (out of the garden - walked outside one day early in spring and thought - oh, we have a vegetable garden! It's the kind of thing you let go during winter. Actually, it wasn't too bad, a couple of months ago we put in broad beans, mustard greens, silver beet, carrots, garlic, onions, cabbage and broccoli, so all we had to do was pull out the weeds encouraged by late winter rains to allow our fledgling vegetables to turn their leafy faces to the early spring sunshine. Mission accomplished, back suffering). Where was I? In the kitchen, improvising a salad. The lettuce, the boiled baby potatoes, plus quartered tomatoes ...

An easy, all-in-together soup ideal for those spring days that revert suddenly to winter. First, set three large cubed potatoes, a whole finely-chopped onion and a chopped clove of garlic to boil in chicken - or preferred - stock (this time I used an Oxo chicken stock cube in about a litre of water - they are quite salty so I didn't add extra salt). Toss in a few ground black peppercorns for some heat. Then add a bunch of broccoli - stalks can also be used if peeled and soft inner section grated or chopped finely - and cook until everything kind of melts down. You can puree it if you like a really creamy consistency; I just gave it a few swishes with my trusty old hand beater . Add milk or cream before serving. Finally, I added some crumbled fetta over the top for an extra burst of salty, creamy flavour. A nice lunch on a cold, showery spring day with fresh bread rolls or ciabatta, spread with pure creamery butter .

Bargain of the week at the market - fresh trevally $6.99 a kilo, a delicious silver-skinned fish ideal for baking. I wrapped it in foil with a dash of soy, a squeeze of lemon, a chopped chile pepper (from my magic chile pepper bush which produces chiles of all different heat intensities), some onion rings and a sprinkling of curry powder for good measure. Then I dropped some fresh udon noodles (the thick, soft ones - from Wing Cheong asian supermarket in Chinatown) into boiling water, rinsed them and then tossed them in a pan - along with some lightly steamed, crunchy broccoli florets - to lightly stir-fry in a small amount of delicious, fragrant sesame oil and a little soy. Noodles and broccoli into a bowl, baked fish over the top. Jasmine tea.

A big pot of Bolognese for a cold night: a large chopped onion and a clove of garlic cooked a few minutes in some olive oil, to which I added ground beef and cooked until brown, then tossed in a can of diced tomato and a good dollop of tomato paste, a dash of marsala, a few herbs from the garden, some ground black peppercorns and a dash of salt. And about a litre of water. I let it cook for hours, topping up the water level and letting it simmer away. Boil up a big pot of water, salt and add spaghetti. Cook to your liking. I’m not an al dente kind of guy, I like the slurpy unctuousness (-osity?) of well cooked pasta when it’s paired with traditional sauces like bolognese. It was great. But there was a heap of Bolognese sauce left over. So the next night, I tossed a can of sweet corn in the base of a baking dish, layered the rest of the Bolognese sauce over it alternately with thin slices of salted-and-drained eggplant and topped the lot with a creamy béchamel of milk, contine...

Here, Saturday was the coldest September day in seven years. So the soups and stews haven't quite gone away yet. (Not that there's anything wrong with soups and stews in warmer weather. One of my favourite hot weather dishes is a curry so hot it has you sweating.) We made a lentil and vegetable soup like this: Brown lentils soaked overnight. Next day, into a large pot with a couple of meaty beef soup bones or some gravy beef. (Meat optional, use your favourite stock.) Cook for an hour, skim if necessary. Add a chopped onion, a stick of chopped celery, half a diced carrot, a potato chopped into small cubes and a scored clove of garlic. Add a teaspoon each of cumin and dried coriander, a generous dessertspoon of tomato paste and a good sprinkling of sumac, say half a tablespoon. Salt and pepper. Cook for another hour. Remove bones, remove and shred meat, return meat to soup. This made a nice Saturday lunch with crusty bread after a shopping trip to the...

Well, this was quite funny - I heard the exchange on the radio news. Instead of leaping on the interjector, wrestling him to the ground and carting him away in a police wagon, the security guys let him talk, and then he just, like, wandered away. To the supermarket, I guess, to get some more cheese. The funniest part was the PM's rejoinder (it's not in the press report). He just stood there and when the guy had finished his diatribe, Mr Howard replied, laconically, 'Well, I've obviously lost your vote!' The laughs don't stop there. Following the incident, Tim Blair posted a poll, see sidebar asking which is the correct cheese to direct at the PM. I love the way Bega Bar-B-Cubes are way ahead in the poll. Mr Howard is so not a brie kind of guy. Of course Roquefort is disqualified on the grounds that its importation to Australia is illegal. Speaking of which, my favourite meal involving Roquefort - apart from eating it au naturel , which I can...

Butterfish. I just looked it up in The Australian Seafood Handbook - Domestic Species (eds. Yearsley, Last and Ward; updated version 2001; published by CSIRO Marine Research and the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation.) It's a great book, but I'm none the wiser*. Butterfish has also been known as Dory, John Dory, Morwong, Old Maid and Scat; while a number of other fish have in turn been known as Butterfish. Whatever. The fish I bought was a succulent white-fleshed cutlet. I wok-fried onion, garlic, ginger, green beans, very finely julienned carrot and broccoli florets in peanut oil with a drop or two of sesame oil until crisp. Set some jasmine rice to boil (absorption method, water to rice two to one, boil, switch off, let absorb). Then, right when the vegetables and rice were almost ready, I pan-fried the fish simply in just a smear of peanut oil, adding a dash of nice soy and a squeeze of lemon when almost done. A few minutes either side. Ri...

Three-colour fettucine with sweet potato. Boil sweet potato in cubes. Boil your three-colour fettucine.* Gently cook a large onion sliced into rings in olive oil. Add some garlic. Then add a can of diced tomatoes. Salt and pepper. When the fettucine is done, combine with the sweet potato and sauce in a large serving bowl, toss in some pine-nuts and scatter with parsley and parmesan cheese. Colourful and delicious with some nice buttered bread on the side. Chardonnay, please. Not too cold. *Bad website, but great pasta without the gourmet price tag. And I love their brand name.

We had the girls Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. How to entertain them? Spring is in the air so we went down to Studley Park to see the ducks and swans ... and have coffee at the outdoor cafe by the river (there's always an agenda for the adults!). We sat with our coffees and ice-creams, watching people hiring rowboats from the boathouse and then just kind of paddling round in aimless circles, some staying within a hundred metres of the launching ramp. Wouldn't you think if you were to hire a boat, you would actually row it somewhere? Maybe not. There were birds of all kinds swooping about, kookaburras, bright green and red rosellas, sparrows, pigeons (what a mixture - sounds like city square meets rainforest!). You really had to watch your coffee lest an unexpected deposit render it undrinkable. It was the most beautiful day - glorious late winter sunshine, bright pink blossom buds popping out on the trees, long-sleeved tops giving way to bare arms ... Aft...

We've had a few house moves over the last few years. The house we are in now has something in common with the last. (Well, apart from walls, rooms, roof etc.) Both houses had possums in the garden and a parrot next door. At the last house, there was an old lemon tree that produced hundreds of lemons each season. It was the most prolific lemon tree I've ever seen. I used to hand bags of them round to all the neighbours. You can only drink so many gin and tonics. The possum (or possums) would get into the tree at night and eat the rind off of the lemons. I'd come out in the morning and find perfectly peeled lemons still hanging right there on the tree. Why didn't they eat the flesh? How did they manage to eat all the rind without knocking the lemons off the tree? And where did they go during daylight? I don't know. We have a young lemon tree in our current backyard as well. The possums haven't discovered it yet. The other weekend, when we...

I've been cooking skate for years, it's an inexpensive ($5 a kilogram) fish yet delicious and easy to handle and cook. A flat fish with two wings, it contains no bones - the flesh is on a cartilagenous skeleton - far easier than bones to deal with. We baked two pieces of skate in half a cup of white wine, the juice of a lemon and dash of water, with a clove of garlic and rings of red onion in the dish. Cooks in twenty minutes. Served with a nice, basic, creamy risotto on the side - a little onion and garlic in olive oil, arborio rice in the warm oil to coat, alternative dashes of white wine and hot chicken stock to absorb slowly until cooked, half a cup of grated parmigiano or other grating cheese for creaminess at the end, salt, pepper, plenty of grated parsley. And a rocket salad on the side - since the rocket is taking off (!) again in the garden - dressed in nothing but a squirt of balsamic vinegar. (How ingenious, salad leaves that come already peppered!) PS: ...

One Friday lunchtime in summer, many years ago, I sat at an outdoor table with work friends, eating one of the most memorable meals I've ever had - mussels in white wine with garlic and chili. It was a hot day and the 'beergarden' was shaded by masses of bougainvillea growing over timber beams. We sat in the dappled shade with ice-cold beers. The mussels were served in large bowls of clear glass - giving you plenty of room to manoevre the shellfish. On the side was another bowl for the shells, while a third bowl contained water for rinsing the fingers. A basket contained thick slices of fresh, crusty bread. It was quite a crowded table as I remember. After plucking the plump, delicious mussels - flecked with garlic and parsley - out of their shells, you dunk the bread into the salty, garlicky juices. I can't think of a nicer meal right now. Mussels from Portarlington were in at the market on Saturday, so I bought a bag - about a kilogram. (Portarlington is a sl...

They seem to be good at the market at the moment. They must be in season. Either that or they truck them in from Queensland or somewhere. There are huge piles of them on the market tables, sometimes two or three still stuck together on their little piece of vine. Old ladies pick through them for the most succulent ones - they are bright green with a kind of translucent sheen (the beans, I mean). Coincidentally T. and I came home with a bagful each. We like our green beans. So we ate beans. We had some simply boiled well, then tossed in butter and a sprinkling of curry powder. Nice with a squirt of lemon juice. * For Sunday lunch I did this: Beat six eggs. Topped and tailed green beans. Boiled them well. Poured egggs carefully into the pan I thought would I most likely be able to extricate eggs from after cooking without it all breaking up. I've had omelette disasters in my time. (I chose a non-stick one and oiled it with olive oil just to be sure.) Plac...