What I Cooked Last Night

I was reading an old cooking magazine from about 1999 when I came across a recipe featuring a ' cappucino ' of something, demonstrating that some fads last longer than others. Except now they call it a froth or foam, and although these substances of tiny bubbles oozing across your food undoubtedly provide a memorable dining experience, they merely remind me - as they will anyone who has ever owned dogs - of the latters' more emetic moments. Which, changing the subject very quickly, makes me wonder how long you maintain a trend before it becomes simply boring or mindlessly imitative, if not outright plagiaristic. After all, plagiarism in writing is a hanging offence, even in places that no longer allow capital punishment. There's always an exception. Remind me never to copy someone else's writing. Anyway. The death of fads: one day soon a chef will place a piece of meat next to the mash instead of on top of it and the sauce on the meat instead of squirting it around ...

We drove to the beach house to take advantage of this string of hot days. It's still quiet here mid-week, but the busy season is coming. An old corner cafe (it used to be Anime Del Mar ) at the Rye end of Point Nepean Road that has lain empty for some time has reopened as a ' Real Estate Agent and Cafe ' under the old Briggs Shaw banner. Excuse me for laughing. Just imagine: the unique skillsets of verbose menu creators merging with those of real estate agents to create a newly enticing style of property prose: Solid red brick cottage on a bed of concrete topped with sundried terra cotta tiles and a side of julienned palings and finished with an aromatic herb garden. Then the price: 1650000 , devoid of dollar sign or decimal point so that it looks cheaper. On the other hand, perhaps you'd just get a brash waiter with a clipboard and a red tie refusing to take no for an answer to his question of whether you want garlic bread - before you'd even sat down and gotten c...

More supermarket nonsense. I was walking down the canned fish and vegetables aisle when I noticed a huge sign which read 'New & Improved!' ; the exclamation mark no doubt being thought to add enormous power to the selling proposition in the mind of the writer. Can you imagine the damage to an already trashed economy if there were no exclamation marks? I digress, but only until the aisle-end display of pallet-loads of branded cola, Australia's largest-selling supermarket item in dollar terms. Maybe the economy's not so bad if people are happy to pay money to rot their teeth and other body parts. Maybe I digressed a little further. Then I stopped dead. 'New' and 'improved'? * This was no ground-breaker, no earth-shatterer, nothing really special at all, just a pot of napoli sauce. But I never seem to get it quite right. Then again, neither do those cheap Italian places that specialise in pizza but do basic sauces for pasta that are so salty they make ...

This election was so little reported here in Australia, that in a straw poll of twenty people I conducted in the last seven days: 1) 15 did not know New Zealand was going to the polls Saturday. 2) 16 did not know the name of the opposition leader/Prime Ministerial candidate. 3) Not a single one knew the name of the opposition deputy leader/Deputy Prime Ministerial candidate. The election result story was printed on page 36 of this country's largest selling newspaper this morning. Make nothing of it. It's just an observation about our nearest neighbour, ANZAC alliance partner, close trading associate nation and the only other prosperous western democracy in this corner of the world. Since most of Australia's twenty millions live on the south-east coast, the two nations with a shared heritage practically stare at each other over the Tasman Sea. No wait, it's an observation about Australian media, not New Zealand. Footnote: the headline writers have already exhausted the...

The first Melbourne Cup I remember was 1965. It must have been a warm day. My father held a family Cup sweep and we listened to the race in the back garden on his portable HMV. My mother sat under the peach tree and held her winning sweep ticket as 3UZ’s Bert Bryant called Light Fingers across the line. My younger brother was beside her in the old wicker pram draped over with an old crocheted insect net. He was three months old. Bart Cummings trained the winner that day, his first Melbourne Cup win; although he had first trained a starter in 1958. Yesterday he won his twelfth Cup with Viewed on the golden anniversary of his first try. Like the numbers? Here's an even more impressive one: Viewed’s owner, Dato Tan Chin Nam first raced a horse in 1948 and has four Melbourne Cups to his credit. The two octogenarians make a great partnership. Cummings on Chin Nam : "He is a benevolent owner. He never complains and knows what we do is best for the horses," Cummings said. Every...

A little to the left of the climbing rose, and closer to the house, down the garden a little way, were beans. Broad beans. They took their time this year, grew slowly. No giant at the top and no Jack at the bottom. No reason to hurry. Now they are out and it is November and we have a hill of beans and the summer herbs are in. November 1. Three cloves of garlic - scored, i.e., finely cross-cut but not right through - in olive oil - Australian, remember? - in a pan. Just until they are warm. Do not burn or even brown. Now throw in two handfuls of beans, just as they are. I didn't peel the skin, they were not big or tough enough. Sweat gently. Add plenty of pepper and not as much salt. Now a half-glass of white wine: simmer gently until done. We are drinking sauvignon blanc now. Given up on chardonnay. The makers have lost the plot. They are either over-oaking it, putting in too much alcohol or trying to make it taste like sauvignon blanc, which it isn't. I miss Len Evans' Cow...

Matt Moran in today's Australian Financial Review Life & Style section (subscription required) writes about the joys of tripe. Yes, joys. Yes, tripe. I grew up with the stuff, done in the traditional English way, with white sauce and parsley. And yes, I liked it. Along with tongue pressed in a bowl, sliced thickly and made into sandwiches with old-fashioned double-black-topped unsliced bread; lamb's fry and bacon; crumbed lamb's brains (especially delicious deep-fried) and roasted lamb flap from which you could peel strips of delicious melting-quality pink meat. Don't grimace, Generation X. Or Y. Or iPod. Or Facebook. Or whatever you're calling yourselves this week. After all, it is your generation that keeps coming up with buzzwords like nose-to-tail eating. But I still don't see too many packages of sweetbreads or calves' heart or lamb kidneys being casually tossed into inner-urban supermarket trolleys along with the Nudie juice or the Simon Johnson ...

Last week The Age previewed Cup food fashions, pointing out that having your finger food done by a proper chef can enhance the experience of placing what's left of your money on horses instead of in banks: At its best, this synthesis between chef and caterer leads to a dish such as Jake Nicholson's pastry cornets with parmesan custard and Tasmanian black truffle, created this year for The Big Group at Lexus and such a perfect - and unexpectedly light - example of modern finger food it might best be described as digitally enhanced. If you can decipher any meaning out of that paragraph at all, it may be that if you whack some truffle into a pastry cylinder, you're a chef and not a caterer. I'm not sure who would be more offended by that, chefs or caterers. No matter. But if you're at the Cup and you notice a bead of sweat on your Lexus salesman's brow while he's scoffing his truffle custard cornet, it might not be race five he's got on his mind but the do...

Once, a long time ago, I had another blog on which I wrote about running and walking dogs. Then I didn't run so much and we didn't have dogs any more, so the blog stopped as well. But sometimes I still run, or at least walk very fast. I ran on Saturday afternoon. It was an unpleasantly hot day with a biting, blustery northwesterly wind. It was the kind of weather that dries you out like a Mildura raisin on a drying rack if you happen to be out in it for a longer time than you intend. I ran a few kilometres and the wind scorched my throat. Maybe I didn't drink enough. Later in the afternoon I was out in the heat some more, walked the few kilometres to and from Sydney Road. Why drive? * It stayed hot all night. I went to bed. I dreamed I was thirsty. These dreams are supposed to be about crawling through the desert on your hands and knees looking for an oasis, but I was in a Coles supermarket and the water and soft drink shelves were closed off and someone was pushing me out ...

I planted it two years ago on a north-facing timber paling fence in the back garden. It failed to grow in its first season. I cut it back, almost to the ground, at the end of that summer. It survived, producing one single bloom last summer. Something happened over winter and spring. My Climbing Gold Bunny took off like a rocket. It marched imperiously over the palings and now its hundreds of yellow blooms are a silent explosion of pale gold in the sun. The vines are approaching the old shed like hungry triffids with an appetite for timber and cement sheeting.

It has been one of the world's biggest health fads for years - if a fad can last that long - and now it is one of the world's biggest scams. The words 'organic' and 'extra virgin' may mean absolutely nothing on your bottle of olive oil. Even the word 'olive' is suspect. News Ltd's dozy Weekly Times carried this story last week (it is not news worldwide), following the ABC's 7:30 Report 's investigation a week earlier: HEATHER EWART: Are consumers being conned? LEANDRO RAVETTI, TECHNICAL DIRECTOR, MODERN OLIVES: Big time. Big time. DR ROD MAILER, AUSTRALIAN OILS RESEARCH LAB: There are products on supermarket shelves we know of that shouldn't be there. Well, straight over to the consumer watchdog then: GRAEME SAMUEL, CHAIRMAN, ACCC: The law is very clear, thou shall not mislead or deceive, we will be honest. Thanks, Graeme. Sit down. HEATHER EWART: The local olive oil industry has long suspected foul play by some international olive oil...

It's hard to eat indoors when it's still light outside at 7.30 in the evening. Had the evening been a few degrees warmer, the following dish would have gone onto the barbecue for our first outdoor meal of the season. But it was cool, so I baked it in the oven and we ate inside. My local fish supplier used to be Lido Seafoods but has changed hands and is now known simply as Sydney Road Fresh Fish. It stocks a far wider range of quality fish than most fish shops and prices are no more than at the over-hyped, overcrowded Victoria Market. I chose a whole rainbow trout - already cleaned and oven-ready - from a tempting array of choices which included baby sardines that need only a dusting with flour and fast frying in oil. Next time. Rainbow trout roasted with leeks, red onion and lemon. 1. Chop a leek radially into thin rings. Rinse grit if necessary. Chop a large red onion into rings. Sweat the leek and onion in oil in a covered pan until they just start to soften. 2. In a bowl, c...

It was the year 2000. The Millennium Bug had failed to bring the world crashing down. The dot.com bust came and went and everything was still fine, give or take a few billion dollars. House prices were like bread dough. They doubled in size every time you looked. Majority thinking was that financial disasters were just a media construct. Or a movie. Or a history book. Around that time, a relative of mine had a friend with a five-digit credit card debt. Interest payments meant the debt wasn't budging. I advised the relative that as a worst-case scenario, the friend's credit card debt could be folded into their mortgage at the then-rate of 4.99%, providing temporary breathing space and allowing the borrower to catch up before accelerating payments back into the mortgage to re-establish the previous equity ratio. The relative advised the friend along those lines. Kind of. The friend went to the bank and came back with no credit card debt, a smiling face, and a brand new car. I hit...

We conclude National Vegetarian Week with five fast (except for the last one) knockout recipes from the Kitchen Hand Official Test Kitchens. Spiced broad beans with pine nuts. Saute fresh broad beans with chopped onion, pine nuts, crushed garlic, cumin and coriander seeds, chopped basil and a squeeze of lemon. Serve on basmati rice. Linguine with avocado and pesto. Cook some linguine, slice an avocado, toss it all together with pesto and optionally top with shaved parmesan. Delicious. Asparagus with blue vein cheese. Quickly boil asparagus and drain, place on plate, sprinkle with crumbled blue vein cheese, capers, cracked pepper and a dash of vinaigrette. Eat with sourdough toast. Green beans in coriander sauce. Blanch a few dozen green beans and drain. Grind a teaspoonful of coriander seeds and half that amount of cumin seeds, add these to a quarter cup of vegetable stock, simmer five minutes to reduce then add a tablespoon of olive oil and a little salt and pour over green beans. Sho...