What I Cooked Last Night

Literally. I'm painting the house. Most of the weatherboards are in good condition but some of the old paint is cracked and dry - to quote Tom Jones - particularly the east-facing side, which is subject to fierce morning summer sun; while the west is shaded by the building next door and the north unaffected, shaded by the eave during the height of summer. The good news is you don't have to go to Bunnings. One of Australia's last remaining independent paint manufacturers, Viponds, produces a top-quality product for less than the Bunnings price on other brands. Viponds is in Norris Street, North Coburg and the customer carpark is ten steps from the door and you can look at the vintage paint cans in the display cabinet while you wait for your paint to be mixed.

Foghorns could be heard from the bay most of last Sunday, a mournful sound that bounced off the dead flat sea and echoed up the hill. The Port of Melbourne must be a busy place. Everything we buy comes from China and it comes by ship and they don't stop on Sundays. Despite the haze, there was a warmth in the air. In the early afternoon, we went down the hill to the beach. You couldn’t see twenty yards out to sea or up or down the beach. A thick, swirling pale yellow mist was rolling off the water and breaking up through the ti-tree like dry-ice smoke in an amateur stage production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night , assisted in this imagery by continued foghorns. Then the fog was gone, exiting stage south, and the sun came out of the yellow, and the stage was restored to its proper size. Two ships were passing each other on the horizon. The boys were in the water now. Baby Alexandra crept through the sand and down to the water's edge and then straight in, just like her br...

The lettuce in several varieties are trying hard but succumbing to bugs. But the mustard greens are holding their heads high. Even the snails and grubs won't touch them, thanks to their strong flavour, I suppose (I'm not sure how you get to prove that). Got mustard greens in plenty? Try: - Using them in place of spinach in filo pastries with fetta - Boiling them with fenugreek (fresh or toasted seeds) and mixing with yogurt and a good dash of salt for a delicious Indian-inspired recipe. Good with vindaloo as a cooling side dish. * One entire viburnum tinus hedge in the back garden: gone. I planted it in 2005 when we moved here. It got to seven feet tall within five years, a magnificent hedge with small white flowers that attract bees. One of those thousands of species of bugs that followed the breaking of the drought last year got it. Apparently viburnum is prone to the problem. Spraying would kill the bees, defeating the point of growing a flowering hedge. I tried pre...

Saturday morning. I switched on the radio. You know the program. I mention it often enough. The voice was familiar. It was Ross Wilson. The song was At The Rock House . That finished and another Daddy Cool song came on. On 3RRR? Why not, of course. But there had to be a reason. It’s 2011. Surely not forty years since Eagle Rock? Surely yes. Daddy Cool was always part parody. You could tell by the name. No serious rock band would choose it. In an interview (no link available) Ross Wilson says "we were loving the forms but taking the p--- (sic: they print far more objectionable words in the papers, why not this?) at the same time". Wilson was especially keen to excavate the piano-based boogie-woogie sound he first discovered in his Dad’s jazz record collection. ... But in crafting a distinctive Daddy Cool sound, which suggested what he called "a past you never had", Wilson also plundered R&B and jukebox pop as well. Wilson says everyone remembers when they fi...

The other night I made a simple pasta dish of spaghetti with garlic, olive oil, anchovies and finely chopped fresh chili. It needed something on the side. I did not have leaves of any kind so I made a salad out of some items that just happened to be there. The salad got out of control. It turned into the main event. Warm salad of roasted pumpkin, fennel, avocado and kidney beans. I had some leftover oven-roasted pumpkin and a head of fennel that resembled a miniature bagpipes. There were a few other potential ingredients vying for inclusion. How to bring them together? Here's how: Chop the fennel into manageable pieces. It will fall into an array of j-curves and other fantastic three-dimensional shapes, allowing you to marvel at the geometry of nature while you construct a mega-salad. Re-heat the cooked pumpkin if you want a ‘warm’ salad; otherwise, add it to the salad straight from the fridge. Open one can of kidney beans. Drain. Halve and section one avocado (relati...

The Sunday roast was a childhood fixture. Let me qualify that. It was a fixture until I was about ten years of age, then it slowly disappeared, like the Latin Mass at about the same time. Perhaps there were too many children to feed. Maybe my mother went through a vegetarian phase, or just couldn’t be bothered doing it any more. I don’t remember. The era passed. While the tradition lasted, the roast was usually ovine. That is to say, sheep. But not lamb. This concept is completely foreign to modern sensibilities: Not lamb? What other kind of edible sheep is there? The same kind actually; just older. The roast we were served was often leg of two-tooth, two-tooth being a farmers’ reference (my grandmother was raised in southern NSW) to a sheep of more than 12 months, otherwise known as hogget; or sometimes leg of mutton, from a sheep older than two years. Lamb is generally considered more tender … but two-tooth, or mutton, cooked properly, had more flavour. And was larger. We were sti...

Albert Park, 16 July 2011. Above, Tom commences his athletic career in the under 9 one-kilometre race-walking event. Below, he nears the finish as evergreen veteran Bob Gardiner (1964 & 1968 Olympics; 1970 Commonwealth Games) continues through ten kilometres. Tom ate well that night. Results and more pictures at Victorian Race Walking Club (motto: "You Walked Before You Ran" ).

It was still dark, but the birds were twittering and tweeting. I sat up and realised those verbs didn’t work any more. More perfectly good words gone forever. I felt my way to the kitchen, found the kettle and put it on. Then I switched the light on. I could have done that first, but I hadn’t been able to find the light switch, and the faint light from the east-facing window had led me to the kettle first. That’s what happens in when you’re in an unfamiliar house. At least I hadn’t clocked myself on an overhanging mantel, or a door ajar. The kettle hummed and then clicked off and I poured the water into a brown ceramic teapot over loose leaves of Tuckfields Tynee Tips tea, the name of which product once led to an alliterative jingle that once heard, could never be forgotten. I haven't. * We were staying in a renovated 1940s timber house in the middle of town. It had polished floors, an east-facing kitchen, two bedrooms, and a lounge furnished with comfortable chairs and a b...

There’s nowhere for the water to go. It just sits there on both sides of the narrow road and it feels like you are driving across some kind of inland sea. Graduated depth markers at intervals on each side of the road remind you how far under water you would have been after the January flood, and the September one before that. This was the road that branches west-south-west off the Western Highway at the historical marker (something to do with gold) 6.5 kilometres out of Horsham. It rides the plain and drops you onto the Wimmera Highway near Natimuk, where floods have antagonised the locals for 150 years. A marker tells you a 48 year old coach operator was washed away from here in a flash flood in 1893. Never saw it coming. I drove across the inland sea, and now it was raining again. The sky had that luminous, sickly green-purple light that says storm. Visibility dropped. I switched the lights on. The rain was deafening but someone in the car, it might have been William, asked if th...

... we're bound for South Australia. (By road, not sea.) Back in a few days.

It was a cold morning. Coffee in the mall, perfectly expressed and poured, and topped with a thick but fine froth shot through with caffeine-laced perfection. And still only $2 . Ridiculous, but in a good way. Then home for an early lunch with an Off the Record soundtrack. Still the best radio program in Melbourne, if you like that kind of thing. * The cauliflower in the fridge must be a week old and still hadn't found a purpose in life. I decided to give it a reason for being. I trimmed and boiled it with half a chopped carrot, drained them when done, added half a teaspoon of cummin seeds, and salt and pepper to taste. Then I pureed it to the consistency of thick soup, due to the retained water in the cauliflower. (Add a little milk if necessary.) I added half a cup of grated tasty cheese, and stirred it over a low heat until the cheese melted. Then I served it immediately with crumbled fetta and a spoonful of yogurt, both optional. Early afternoon the sun broke th...

You can only have so many cars, unless you’re Lindsay Fox or a bureaucracy. In my case, I once could fit two cars in the double garage, one on the front lawn and two more in the driveway. But that was years ago. Then we moved, and there was no garage. Plus we had two more children, and children cost more than cars unless you run Alfa Romeos. So I was back to two cars. The Tangerine Dream for me, and the Volvo (English: “I roll”) 940 for Tracy. But you can still window-shop. My favourite lunchtime reading became the online car classifieds, after giving up on online newspapers full of Z-grade celebrities and stories about overweight dogs or horses drinking in bars. Read enough car ads and you develop a kind of sixth sense about the condition of a vehicle. ‘A couple of supermarket scratches’ means major bodywork; ‘long reg.’ mean two months; ‘recent full Selespeed service’ means the gearbox is rubbish; ‘near new Pirellis’ means ‘quite old Pirellis’; ‘quick sale’ means the vehicle...

Lunchtime yesterday. I was at the top end of Collins Street trying to walk south and the rain was horizontal, propelled by a gale that was howling straight up the middle like a 1970s Western Oval southerly. It had been raining before the wind came, and the street had been a sea of umbrellas. Suddenly, the wind got up and all the $10 umbrellas blew inside out and snapped their ribs, and someone’s quality one flew up into the plane trees and hung there like a paratrooper landing in a forest. It should be fine if the owner manages to retrieve it. The rain was so intense people had to take refuge in shops. I was outside Harrold’s Gentlemen’s Outfitters and, at the height of the storm, I and four or five others huddled in the entrance set back from Collins Street, and that made the electric doors open, so we stood inside instead, far enough back to let the doors close, and waited for the storm to pass. I amused myself by inspecting the display case nearest the door. Paul Smith driving glo...

On Sunday afternoon, a garden tea party attended by friends and relations was held for William to mark his sixth birthday. The guest of honour wore an argyle-patterned wool vest knitted by his maternal grandmother with a white linen shirt and his favourite red tie, and fawn corduroy trousers. The weather report for Sunday had changed every day last week, variously predicting sun, rain, cool, warmer and dry. Contingency rooms inside had been prepared, but the afternoon turned out merely cloudy, and the sun appeared mid-afternoon, and warmed the gathering. Guests were welcomed at the front gate by Thomas while a gaily-coloured bunting banner flapped in the breeze. The bunting, made by Tracy from neat triangles of vintage fabrics sewn onto white cotton webbing, festooned the front garden all the way from the front right stay of the carport to the trunk of the ornamental pear in front of the lounge room window. The guests included William’s current school friends and kindergarten f...