What I Cooked Last Night

And here's the one that was too big to carry around town last week. Are books expensive? Unanswerable. Is a $90 book too expensive? Unanswerable, but the answer is no, anyway. You can put $90 into your tank and tear it up in an afternoon driving down the coast, but the $90 book takes you around the world and not just once and you keep it for life. I can't see a book of this scale (hardback, 480 pages) making much margin even at the price. They sell glossy magazines a tenth of the weight at a quarter the price and full of nothing. Nor are books subsidised by ads for watches and Burberry and single barrel Scotch. This is not a cook book. They just sell it out of that section because there are recipes in it. It's a two-kilogram rebuke to purists who insist that only those who hail from such parts may write about them. Christine Manfield an expert on India? She is now. Buy it for the photography. Not of food; though that is there. The teeming cities; the mysterious wate...

Here's William at the same age of fifteen months. Hose off the dirt and you'd mistake one for the other. The hair is identical; Tom's was always straight.

That was yesterday. She sat in my chair and smiled. Today she wore yellow, and there was a trip to town; two bookshops, one retail store (other) and the State Library. But before all that, coffee. Brunetti is 75 metres - to the inch - from Flinders Street station if you don't count the platform, escalators and steps. I had coffee (Vienna); Tracy cappucino. The children (Thomas and Alexandra) ate a coarse-sugar dusted doughnut, Italian-style. It was fat and doughy and fresh, and then it was just some grains of sugar on a plate and more grains on their faces. Dymock's is downstairs off Collins. Dymock's recently announced expansion plans. You can see why. Their staff are knowledgeable and the book selection is as good as it gets in a chain bookstore. Dymock's is also soaking up the foot traffic from the defunct Angus & Robertson and Borders, the latter of whose staff were in turn snooty, unobtainable, uninterested or even disinterested. By contrast, Dymock'...

The post directly under this one may have restored my brother's faith in simple parties . (Just last Thursday, I sat at the place he occupies; he was diagonally opposite; Alexandra was in a high-chair at the place occupied by our sister. We had lunch.) That was July 1969. What else happened that month? Nothing much. 43 years later, our mother is still feeding us. Just not so often.

Yes, he's grown . (He's not a Footscray fan, they gave out the caps at kindergarten as a kind of early recruitment drive. He remains true to the Same Olds, but the cap is handy.)

The only hand-held devices you can use at this restaurant are your knife and fork. "Only six months ago we never saw an iPad, but I've had a two-year-old in here with an iPad - it's a joke," co-owner Nabil Kurban said. "We are just letting people know that being at the dinner table for the family is the most valuable time of the day so that people can say, 'How are you, how's your day, is everything OK?' "It's a very special moment. We are just asking for one hour a day - no gadgets at the dinner table."

In a pan, soften two very finely chopped onions in oil. Add some ghee for a richer flavour. Place a dozen cashews, one large can of coconut cream, a teaspoon of chili, a knob of peeled and chopped ginger the size of your thumb, a large clove of garlic (or two small), half a teaspoon each of cinnamon and garam masala, two cardamom pods and a couple of rays of star anise (optional) into a food processor. Hit ‘turbo’. Watch as the colours homogenise. Listen as the initial nut grind goes into a high-pitched turbine-smooth whizz. Twenty seconds and you will have a pinkish beige sludge flecked with small pieces of cashew. The aroma will make you want to spoon it out of the processor and eat it now. Steep a couple of tablespoons of raisins in hot water to which you have added a teaspoon of turmeric. Remove half of the onion from the pan, reserve. Transfer cashew and coconut cream mixture to the pan. Drain the raisins and add. Stir and cook very gently for ten minutes. Add a little wate...

Every now and then the weekend papers have something worth reading, such as how to write a song and how to write a movie score . And both in the one magazine. Quote: Morricone says when he was young he tried to improve some mediocre films. "I tried to put some really strong music and accelerated them too much, and the result was way too strong for the film. It was [as] if you dressed a parrot like a cardinal."

The visitors left on Sunday. We had been out all day and, by late afternoon when we returned, the swarm had gone; although some late risers were still buzzing around the temporary hive. To where they have flown I don’t know. I hope it’s not in the roof. Around a thin branch deep in the old weigela shrub, the bees left a temporary hive structure that was several opaque white semi-cylindrical sections of honeycomb-patterned wax in a cascading form that resembled a modernist chandelier in the stairwell of a 1950s public building.

I kept bumping into Occupy Melbourne last Friday. I was in town for the day, working in an office in Collins Street, fifty metres from the mess of tents in the City Square. I went out mid-morning for an apple from the Swanston Street fruit stall. By that time the eviction was commencing and I passed between rows of protesters holding placards made from brown cardboard that was wet because of the drizzle. At lunchtime I went out for sushi from the cheap sushi shop in Capitol arcade where you get free miso with your order. The intersection of Collins and Swanston was at a standstill and several trams were stuck in the throng. It looked like Wellington Parade on a Saturday afternoon after the football in the 1950s when trams lined up to ferry thousands back into town. It was raining now, and the police were telling the protestors to go home. Why wouldn’t you? The City Square is an ugly concrete slab with patches of hard sand. A dreadful place to camp. The shouting had begun. A man weari...

I’ve done it again. Volunteered. This time it’s a 125th anniversary publication for a college. My mother and two of my sisters walked through its gates in the 1940s and the 1960s/1970s respectively. But that’s incidental. The school shares its archivist with the school that was the subject of the book I finished last year, and she asked me if I’d do one for the second school. I said yes because this one will be shorter. But it still has to be done. I said yes also because, in a strange twist of coincidence, the archivist was my Grade Three teacher in 1965 and it is ingrained in one to say yes to one’s teachers. (Yes, she was young – 1965 was her first year out of teacher’s college.) * The college archive was in a cramped office in one of the old wings that was once the nuns’ living quarters. Across one entire wall was one of those sliding compactus things that holds sixty million documents in no particular order. Me and my big mouth. I went to the 1960s and pulled out some annuals...

Four is grown up, but not. Mr Four is a small and generally self-possessed gentleman who suffers occasional unfortunate fits of uncontrollable laughter. But Mr Four has dignity. It is the last great age of childhood before they go to school and get corrupted and bring home the schoolyard’s whining jargon, and want what the others want. In the morning he comes to the corner and holds his fat arms around my neck and kisses me. Then he lets go, and waves, and runs brightly back around the corner and I go away, and when I come back at night he is always asleep, his eyes tight slits sloping down and his mouth half open, like his baby photo . * Years ago, there was another four-year-old. He was just the same. I must have been twelve, off to school. It is winter, 1969. He comes to the gate with the same self-possession. The same kiss, the same arms around the neck. I wonder now if I was as patient with my brother as I am with his nephew, my son. * Thomas turns five this weekend. An...

I looked out the front window. It was a warm, cloudless afternoon, but the room had almost imperceptibly darkened, as if a cloud had passed the sun. There was something in the air, like smoke, or a dust storm. I went outside and into the front garden. The flowers were out, and the shrubs were in bloom, and the garden was looking nice, and the thing in the air was bees. Thousands of them. They were flying around in ever decreasing circles like fighter planes homing in on an enemy base. They were silent. I thought swarming bees would buzz but the only hum came from a light plane cutting a line in the northern sky towards Essendon airport. The bees were circling the old weigela. It could be sixty years old. It's about ten feet tall and almost as wide. It still flowers well, but inside it is like an old hedge with thick gnarled inner branches. By five o’clock they had settled. How many bees are there in a swarm? It’s the size and shape of a bagpipes, pendulous at the bottom an...

I had some fish left over after a lunch of rolls with avocado, salad shoots and smoked salmon, which was a rare luxury put on for friends who had visited along with their new addition to the family for some socialisation with our children. The new addition was a two-month old maltese terrier poodle cross, light brown in colour, a tiny round roly-poly thing, name of Boxer. They should have called it Malteser. They live in an apartment and have no children. We sat outside and the dog acted as if he thought he had been re-released into the wild. Apparently all dogs are 99% wolf in terms of DNA, or appetite, or mating habits, or brain power, or something. This creature was woolly and scampered over the lawn like a spring lamb and was therefore by definition a wolf in sheep's clothing. That night I cooked up a pot full of pasta - bavette - drained it and simply added twirls (for forkability) of the salmon, a generous dollop of sour cream and a shower of cracked black pepper. Delicious...