What I Cooked Last Night

(UPDATED 1/1/09; more pictures added) January Australian Open: tennis on the lawn. February Forty celsius: herbs and succulents baking in late afternoon heat. March Mystery dish: Lasagne? Moussaka? Sweet potato layered with cheese sauce? Can’t remember. But the green thing in the middle is a basil leaf. April Instant circus: elephants dance on cans of peppers and beans. Crescent moon: brittle sky on a cold late autumn evening, as seen from Merri Creek trail (moon right of centre, barely visible - click to enlarge). May Apprentice chef: Thomas with saucepans. Downpour: Lygon Street in flood. June Birthday: William turns three. Winter fun: Thomas reinvents library steps; clears shelves in search of favourite book. Mr Horse unimpressed. July Winter sun: lunch at Blairgowrie café: Tracy's hand and coffee obscured by giant cake serving. August Surf's up: early afternoon on a freezing Portsea ocean beach. September Snack time: two boys in a chair; Mr Owl looks on. Storm: waves batte...

It was early afternoon on a hot Christmas Day. Inside a million houses across the country you’d be deafened by the roar of ripping paper, popping corks, slamming oven doors and everyone talking at once. But outside in the heat, it was so quiet you could hear a dry gum leaf scratching along the street in the breeze. I got the car out and we drove east on an empty freeway to where the suburbs are green and leafy. Twenty minutes later I took an exit ramp, crossed over the freeway, turned right into a side street and a kilometre later, turned right again back over the freeway along a narrow bridge road that ended at a steel gate. The gate slid open. We drove through. Someone – one of Tracy’s cousins - had had the brainwave of organising Christmas lunch on a golf course. Christmas lunch on a golf course makes sitting at an over-sized dining table for three hours in a too-small inner-city terrace house dining room with twenty other people on a hot day feel like a prison sentence, especially ...

... corporations fail, globes warm, economies cool, rates crash and economists argue but we're all agreed that afternoon must tea go on. Another cup, thank you. And pass me a piece of chocolate cake. Happy Christmas.

The rain is still around and the days have been cooler and Christmas is coming. I cooked this osso buco recipe a few nights ago and it was good. It seemed a shame to throw out the fragrant sauce that was left over. So I didn't. I made a sauce for pasta - a ragu. I chopped the remaining cooked meat, returned it to the left over sauce and added a can of diced tomatoes, half a can of chick peas, a cup of white wine and a sprinkling of chopped parsley. For this meat sauce I cooked a pot of rigatoni, a grooved pasta robust enough to carry the fragrant ragu. The whole thing was capped off with a heap of shaved parmesan and more chopped parsley. It must have been good. Even the children ate it. Except for the chick peas.

Apparently it was the most rain in one day since early 2006. Most of it ended up in the bay of course, but the downpour coincided with a new government campaign to encourage people to use less water. The campaign material shows two pictures of a dam, some years ago and now, with the recent picture showing a lower level of water. A cynical counter-campaign would show two identical photos of a empty valley entitled The Dam the Government Failed to Build . The irony is that the north-south pipeline currently being built to divert water from the Goulburn to backyard water features in Melbourne is now cutting a swathe through more wilderness than would have any dam . * Early afternoon Sunday, the clouds drifted away to the north. Sunday is a day of rest but rest is what you want it to be. For me it means avoiding shopping malls full of frantic shoppers and taking a long walk along Merri Creek. Off I went, pushing the wakeful child (Thomas) in the three-wheel pram while the sleepy child (Wil...

It was a warm Tuesday morning. I caught the train into town, got off at Parliament station, walked down a wind-swept Lonsdale Street, climbed a hundred steps up to the entrance of a vast grey office block and entered through sliding glass doors big enough for an aircraft hangar. No wonder. You could have parked a jumbo in the lobby. I crossed the marble floor to the lifts. One whispered open and took me to what felt like the eightieth floor. I was the only person in it. The digital clock on the electronic floor indicator read 9:15 and I wondered what time the other million people in the building must have started work. I sat in a glassed-in reception area for about ten minutes reading one of those free newspaper magazines full of ads for diamond-encrusted watches and articles about how to cope during a recession. Then a woman burst through the door, smiled and grabbed my hand, shook it furiously and then led me down a passage-way and around three corners to an office cubicle the size o...

A new book came across my desk: The Man Who Ate the World . Now, where have I heard a title like that? Rummage, rummage. Ah, here it is. In the row of books behind another row of books in the long, low timber cabinet in the lounge room. I really should get rid of some books. In fact, I really should get rid of some cabinets the books are in. Problem is, you can't throw out the books you've read because you like them and therefore you will always keep them; but paradoxically you cannot throw out the ones you haven't read, because you might like them when you do read them. It's a problem I don't know how to solve without the introduction of a 28-hour day. I pulled out the book: The Man Who Ate Everything , published in 1998. Tracy gave it to me one Christmas. But it's by a different author - Jeffrey Steingarten - so the title similarity had not indicated, as I had thought, a sequel, a prequel, one of a series or book two of a trilogy. And yet there were other lik...

This is easy, fast and surprisingly good. Take a can of chickpeas, a 500g pack of spaghetti, two cloves of garlic and a thick slice of prosciutto, diced. Cook the spaghetti. Puree two-thirds of the chickpeas with the garlic cloves, a tablespoon of olive oil and a little salt. Sizzle the prosciutto in oil in a pan and when almost brown, add the reserved chickpeas. Drain the cooked spaghetti reserving a little fluid, place the spaghetti in the pan with the prosciutto and chickpeas and combine. Add a small amount of the pasta cooking water if necessary. Transfer to serving bowls and top with pureed chickpeas and plenty of chopped parsley if you still have acres of it in your garden as I do.

7:30 p.m. Chimney and terra cotta tile roofs from the 1940s; poplars of a similar age; storm clouds gilded by setting sun. 8 p.m. Clouds drift beyond the sharp lines of post-art deco apartments that were once small-scale factories. 8:30 p.m. Evening turns monochrome; 1919 Lincoln mills chimney in distance, a lonely sentinel of a long-gone manufacturing era.

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...