What I Cooked Last Night

Of course, I'm no vegetarian but many of my friends are. It's a matter of degree. Some vegetarians gaze longingly into butcher shop windows after lunching on burgers made out of soybean; others eat only windfall fruit from disused orchards and sip the morning dew from wild buttercups. A vegetarian acquaintance of mine fries up panfuls of imitation bacon, although it is imitation only in that it comes in rashers; it certainly doesn't smell like bacon. Maybe that's the idea. Apparently the smell of bacon is what causes most vegetarians to fall off the wagon. For Day Two of National Vegetarian Week, a salad that is on high rotation in our kitchen. It's a once-a-weeker, at least. Warm vegetable salad with toasted pinenuts. Boil a dozen halved small potatoes, washed well but unpeeled, until almost soft. Slice a dozen baby roma or similar tomatoes in two. Slice a red onion into rings. Grill the flesh of a large red capsicum until blackened, then cool, peel, cut into strip...

It was a sunny spring morning and I was driving south on the Monash tollway - maximum speed 70 km/h - and I had the radio on in the car and they were talking about National Vegetarian Week . I didn't know there was one, although there seems to be a 'week' for just about everything these days. Some very important things even get an entire year to themselves. For example, what do you think 2008 is the 'year of'? What would you think is occupying the consciousness of the world at this point in history? Yes: potatoes . Which means this year's National Vegetarian Week - occurring within the Year of the Potato like some kind of tuberous alignment of the planets - is sure to be a great success. My contributions to this momentous week will include some old favourites. So let's commence with the first. I have diplomatically remove a previous option of prosciutto in the following recipe and added capers instead for a salty kick. National Vegetarian Week, Day One: Tube...

Yes, this is why I like springtime.

Reader polls are as compelling a waste of time as you're likely to find. This one in The Australian Magazine asked readers to nominate the best Australian song of the past twenty years. Crowded House took six positions in the top twenty. Maybe not so astounding, given their uncanny ability not just to write the kinds of songs that make you remember where you were when you first heard them, but to write a lot of them. Distant Sun takes me back to a ghostgum-lined country road, driving somewhere south of Heathcote in central Victoria late on a golden Sunday afternoon. A long time ago, but it comes back with the sound of a song. Otherwise, Ed Kuepper's Black Ticket Day , something by the Go-Betweens and any number of Paul Kelly's songs could have gotten mentions. And for me, just about anything from silverchair's Diorama , on which Daniel Johns collaborated with Van Dyke Parks, beats last year's Straight Lines . But then I didn't contribute to the poll. * Oh, f...

1. Nobody knows what will happen. 2. Nobody knew two years ago, some just thought they did. 3. Nobody knew six months ago, some just thought they did. 4. Nobody knows today, some just think they do. 5. But they're no longer sure. 6. Nobody knows where money comes from. 7. Nobody knows where it goes. 8. Most importantly, nobody knows the murky places it visits along the way. 9. Because there are some places money is not supposed to go. 10. Because of this, a year ago fringe brokers were on the nose. 11. The banks loved it. 12. Because it made the banks look good. 13. And the brokers had to raise their rates. 14. Bad brokers! said the banks. Borrow from us instead! 15. But banks are not good and never were and never will be. 16. Also, banks are not clever. 17. Because they had fingers in exactly the same pies as the brokers. 18. Some they didn’t even know about. 19. But the banks soon found out. 20. And then they had to raise rates. 21. In the glare of publicity. 22. And banks hate...

I read recently of someone whose notebook computer was stolen. The computer contained most of a book he was writing and he was beside himself with terror. No backup. No printed pages. Nothing new, I suppose. I can imagine authors of old slaving away by candlelight, falling asleep at the quill and having the house burn down along with the manuscript. Sometimes I imagine Blogger - if not the entire internet - disappearing into thin air because my book is a blog. There will be seven chapters and an introduction and half of each chapter is a blog post. I printed out the first six posts - three chapters - delivered them to the commissioning publisher and breathed a little easier.

From today's Australian : Australia's winning publishers: PANPA (Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers' Association) Newspaper of the Year Awards. Highly commeded: The Sunday Age, Sunday Canberra Times, The Sunday Mail. No mention of any awards for sub-editors or proofreaders. The Australian itself picked up the Online Newspaper of the Year (Metropolitan) award. Has anyone tried getting around its online opinion pages?

The yellow sticker on the pack read "Sshhh! They're sleeping" . After mechanical debearding, Tasmanian Spring Bay mussels are shrink-wrapped into a kind of plastic oxygen chamber where they slumber blissfully for 'up to nine days', according to the pack. Certainly, they were very quiet. I wondered whether they were not in an induced coma rather than merely sleeping. I placed them very carefully into the pot of boiling fluid. What if one were to wake up seconds before being boiled to death? The fluid comprised a cup of white wine, a little olive oil, an onion, five chopped garlic cloves, and a chili - all finely chopped - and some ground pepper. The mussels were cooked in two minutes. Then a shower of chopped parsley and away you go. See how high you can stack up the shells in a side dish without letting them clatter to the table. It's an art. * The best part of this dish, besides the fat, briney, orange mussels, is mopping up the garlic-infused fluid with good...

It wasn't so much loaf as doorstop. If you put it on the ground and kicked it you would break a toe. That's a nice change from the kind of supermarket bread that weighs nothing and collapses like a bag of cotton wool when you put something as light as a newspaper on top of it in the basket. My doorstop was a loaf of Dench seeded sourdough. It would keep for a week if you could resist eating it. It's a little too dense for sandwiches of the delicate asparagus or vinegared cucumber or shaved ham kind, but it comes into its own topped robustly with home-made meatloaf, or smoked trout with capers and mayonnaise, or thick slices of mature cheddar and pickles. Dench sourdough makes great toast. Cut it thickly and toast the slices lightly , top it with butter and Vegemite and eat it with strong tea. After a breakfast like that you'll feel like hunting lions.

The Spencer Street end of town. It was one of those bars with deep shadows and retro red furniture and lampshades everywhere; and cigarette smoke drifting through the open wall-width windows from the area smokers have to go to avoid choking the people in the bar. You can tell it's an industry function because people smoke in a different way when they're networking. Kind of mechanically and efficiently, while trying to converse above the music and keying each other's phone numbers into cell phones. It's a desperate game. Every contact could mean business. Waitpeople with leg tattoos and too-short skirts plied silver trays: chicken balls glazed with sweet chilli, rice rolls tied up like parcels with dipping sauce, savoury pastries, and things you couldn't make out in the semi-darkness. The paper napkins were sensibly black because you can't see the smudge of chilli sauce when you mop it away from your face. Things were bad, was the general consensus. Are you busy?...

Do pictures make a difference? I don't know. My considered guess is that sales of cooking books and food magazines would crash overnight if there were no pictures of food. It wasn't always the way. A review of publishing over time would probably reveal a slow decline in food writing together with a steady increase in photography and food 'styling'. (Food photography quiz: what's the hardest food to shoot? My answer at bottom, but your opinion welcomed.) What brought this to mind was a browse through a bunch of old recipes and food articles I keep in an old timber wine box in the back room. The older articles are mainly text, sometimes accompanied by a line drawing; for example, the excellent food column written by Steve Manfredi that used to be published in the Friday review section of the Australian Financial Review . The newer ones generally feature a prominent illustration or photograph. So if you want to make money in food, don't cook it or write about it - ...

'Buster' Tom in training to win 5000 metres Gold at the 2028 Olympic Games to be held at the National Sports Biosphere in Alice Springs, the new capital of Austrazealand following the collapse of Canberra after it was overrun by kangaroos and invaded by wombats, which dug extensive tunnels under the House of Representatives, causing it to collapse, trapping 128 parliamentarians for a hellish four days. The fledging nation combines previous South Pacific countries Australia and New Zealand, its national flag continuing to bear the Southern Cross but with the Union Jack replaced by the national coat of arms: the emu and the kiwi.

First there was FuelWatch, soon to be tossed out by the Senate , then there was GroceryChoice. A website is a policy? No. A website is a waste of time. Of course, some commentators have already stated the obvious in that those most in need of price comparisons are less likely to have internet or access to it. My mother thinks a browser is someone who spends Tuesday afternoons at the library. Associate Professor of Competition and Fair Trade at UNSW, Frank Zumbo calls the GroceryChoice scheme a dismal failure: ... (The) GroceryWatch website ... another version of the discredited FuelWatch. ... provides a very limited monthly snapshot that will be out of date as soon as it is posted on the web. GroceryChoice completely ignores wider issues such as breadth of range and regional variation of stock. Metcash, which the ACCC pointedly and unfairly criticises, stocks independent supermarkets under the IGA and other banners. In stark contrast to Coles and Woolworths/Safeway, these independent...

I don’t bake: Tracy does. Being of Scottish heritage, baking is like a sixth sense to her. Essentially, she opens the oven door and throws a bunch of ingredients and a baking dish in; and soon after there’s anything from a batch of muffins (chocolate and cherry was the last lot) to a fully decorated hummingbird cake on the table. The following recipe has been on high rotation here this winter. Unfortunately, Tracy is as vague as I am about quantities but this is as close as I can establish. Bring one and a half cups dried fruit to a simmer, then let cool, then drain. (Not packet dried fruit – we buy sultanas, currants, prunes and apricots in bulk from the nut shop.) Process a whole orange in your blender. Or two mandarines for a nice variation. Whisk two eggs. Cook enough pumpkin (or sweet potato) for one cup when mashed. Now: mix all of the above with two cups wholemeal and one cup white self-raising flour and a third of a teaspoon each of ground nutmeg, ground cinnamon and ginger. Bu...