What I Cooked Last Night

I don't know if these recipes are repeated. I don't have an index or a contents page or labels or tabs or a like button or a follow-me-on-twitter thing with a bird-with-outstretched-wings logo, as if twitter lets you break free of the multitudes and soar alone in a soundless, soaring space where you hear nothing but your own wings beating the air ... Didn't someone make a record about that once?* Now the bird imagery is used to drag millions of humans down into a kind of subterranean worldwide typing pool where they issue forth messages not much longer than the grunting of cavemen, and some of their grunts make the front pages of newspapers. Nuts. But then I got dragged into it, because I had to write some tweets for clients. They couldn’t even do their own grunting! So I set up an account - "Instantly connect! Follow your friends and your favourite celebrities!" - to see how it worked. Apparently it’s not about character count (140) but message byte lengt...

At 10 o’clock the truck arrived to pick up the desk . The driver got down. He was small and old and grey. He wore a cap that was too big and it made him look like an old ferret. He introduced himself as Pat, opened the back door of the truck, pressed a button underneath, and the motorised tray whirred to the ground. Then he leapt up onto the back of the truck and came out with a trolley. “It’s heavy,” I said, referring to the desk. “Not a problem!” he grinned. He still had some teeth. Later, after getting the desk aboard, he said he’d been driving trucks up and down highway 31 for sixty years. Sixty years? Now he just did it for fun, driving his truck to Melbourne once a week from Pyalong to do volunteer pick-ups and deliveries for the op shop. He told me he had just turned eighty. An eighty-year-old who drives halfway across the state and juggles wardrobes and Danish director’s desks for fun?

The new template doesn't allow paragraphs until you select 'press enter for line breaks'. The default setting is set to 'use tag'. I've changed it on mine. I couldn't break Saturday's post into two paragraphs.

Back of the bottle: Since 1698. Finest Scots (sic) whisky. Cutty Sark picture embossed in the glass. Front of the bottle: Follow us on Twitter.

It's about the size of the Titanic. You don't so much sit at it as pilot it. It was built in the 1930s by Danish craftsmen from some Scandinavian tree or other, that was clearly sacrificed specifically for the purpose. There wouldn't have been much left of it. The warm grain of the desk glows chocolate russet coffee according to the light, especially when you give it a loving polish with Marveer. The whole thing is rounded like an early barge. The drawers to either side of your chair are enclosed behind curved lockable timber doors that are attached to the desk by full-length brass hinges. The lock inlays are also of brass, and the keys are the old-style substantial ones in stainless steel, meaning you won't lose them. Two more lockable doors in the front, to either side of the foot well, hide cavernous stowage. With the desk against a wall, these cupboards act as concealed storage, making them ideal for storing your life savings or your rare whisky. Make sure you won’t...

Well, actually, no. I don't recall it ever being that hot on Good Friday. What I do recall is the silence, something even more apparent in recent times when the city never takes a day of rest. I drove to Essendon for an early lunch at the house of a thousand tins, and while the roads were not completely empty, they seemed to be missing that kind of pressing traffic that is always on a mission, tearing off to a supermarket or some other kind of store. On crossing the valley, I usually run into a long, impatient and unyielding northwards line of traffic bound for DFO at Essendon airport. But on Friday everything was closed. I understand why they legislated for seven day trading all those years ago. But a silent suburb beats a herd of black BMWs racing to be first in the single lane entrance to the shopping mall any day. Now it’s once a year instead of one and a half days a week. Enjoy it. Shortly after three in the sultry, silent afternoon. No breeze blew through the open arched d...

Seems to have been all seafood lately, or maybe I just haven’t written about the less interesting dinners; baked beans on toast, etc. (Having said that, if you add scrambled eggs flecked with chopped prosciutto or pancetta, sliced warmed avocado, grilled mushrooms and a grilled leek sausage, you have a passable supper. Interestingly, people seem to be eating this kind of thing in the morning in cafes all over town, but I can’t; just like I could never face up to the British morning fare of kippers before midday.) Nevertheless, Easter week is a good time to be eating seafood. I went into the fish shop in Sydney Road to buy some clams to make pasta vongole, but came out with a large bag of mussels instead, due to $5.99 compared to $25.99 per kilogram. I also bought some flathead tails because they are delicious and the children are not yet eating mussels. (However, William did ask me if I picked them off the pier from which they had been diving. I replied no, but not far away; just acr...

next-gen , as in: The company is positioning itself as the next-gen platform for restaurant marketing, leveraging the appeal of video and power of social media to help restaurants drive foot traffic by allowing diners to discover and share the dishes with their friends across their social graph. Nos 2 and 3 also appear in that paragraph.

When I was a child, about five or six years old, I used to go into the kitchen and open the lower door in the corner cupboard. Behind this door, at floor level, were literally thousands of tins. They could have fed the family (of nine) for years, decades even. Is this an exaggeration? It didn’t seem to be at the time. There were mountains of them, all piled in without being stacked like with like. It looked like a supermarket after an earthquake. There were tins of Biddy's peas, PMU carrots, Big Sister chocolate pudding, SPC spaghetti and baked beans, Tom Piper sausages and vegetables, Keen's mustard powder, Berri tomato juice, Letona apricot juice, Bear Brand and Carnation condensed milk, Ardmona halved pears, IXL strawberry jam, Edgell mushrooms in sauce, kidney beans, tongue, ham, camp pie, tuna, sardines, salmon, cat food; and the odd packet of Kookaburra spaghetti, Mammy flour (free coin of the world in every pack) and O-So-Lite self-raising flour. They’re the ones I can...

The cost of the electricity used in this household is paid to the company that runs the Tasmanian hydro-electric generating plant. Hydro electricity generation produces no carbon dioxide, a gas referred to by the federal government as 'carbon'. Despite producing no carbon dioxide, the hydro electricity company is obliged by federal legislation to provide a 'green' energy product (branded GreenPower by the bureaucracy: "Helping Australia transition to renewable energy" ) as well as its core product, even though its core product – hydro electricity - is the 'greenest' energy available in the market. The company complies with this legislative stipulation, despite the absurdity of having to theoretically add wind and solar into hydro to 'improve' its 'green' credential. (Ironically, the hydro company also clearly shows the GreenPower cost penalty on its website, which many other energy providers do not, preferring sanctimoniously to bury th...

We took them to the Astor cinema to sit in antique fold-up chairs, see curtains opening on the wide screen and, most importantly, eat choc tops. Shock: the boys chose Golden Gaytimes instead. The movie was an old musical with no special effects and a Rodgers and Hammerstein soundtrack. Alexandra, however, had a Choc Top to herself. Before intermission, bored with the movie, she sat on a couch next to the sleeping cinema cat and did not spill a drop of ice cream. I sat on the other side of the cat and read the Sunday newspaper in the dim art deco light with the sounds of gunshots and whinnying from the auditorium and the faint rumble of trams outside.

This recipe has the heat of the equator, the tang of the tropics, and the sweetness of the islands; all of which is academic - we ate the meal on a cold autumn night in Melbourne with rain pelting on the iron roof. I evolved the recipe from an old balchao dish I used to make. The original recipe was as hot as you like; later versions toned down the chili, added spices, added coconut, added lime. Let's get started: fry two onions in ghee. Remove and retain onions. Brown one kilogram of chicken pieces in the pan. Add oil or ghee as required. Remove chicken when browned. Meanwhile, process half a cup of roasted cashews (I dry-roasted raw cashews first), half a cup of dessicated coconut, two large and very ripe and juicy vine tomatoes, two tablespoons or slightly more of malt vinegar, one black cardamom pod, one twinkle of star anise, a scatter of dried chilies, half a teaspoon each of crushed cinnamon and cumin seeds, four cloves of garlic, an inch of peeled ginger and one sma...

How much do you pay for coffee? The price of my favourite coffee rose on Monday. From $2 to $2.20. Consider that as table rental with the coffee thrown in free and it could be Melbourne's best entertainment value. The coffee is robust and vibrant in the old-fashioned Italian style. Order it strong and you'll float down Sydney Road, unlike some of the warm beige concoctions with art-directed froth you get down in Brunswick. You sit outside in the shade of the trees watching the passing Coburg parade; and it is a parade like nowhere else in Melbourne. No pretensions here. You might have to wait for a table, as many are taken up by local retired Greeks and Italians, as well as residents from the special needs accommodation nearby, who like to take their time over their coffee; and you won't get a friendlier crowd anywhere. Brunswick Street bristles with attitude by comparison. The buskers are good quality. Yesterday in the mid-morning sunshine, a young woman sang a...

We haven’t had song of the month for a while, so here are two. * His name was Jones and he was my personal favourite British pop singer of the 1960s. No, not Tom. He was my second favourite. (Have you heard Without Love at full volume lately?) The other Jones, Paul, had an amazing range and sang - both solo and for Manfred Mann - some of the best songs ever written. One was Come Tomorrow , a soul masterpiece originally recorded by Marie Knight. If the song of a song bird could replace my wrong words Then my dear it’s the song I would borrow And tonight you would hear the saddest song of the year And you’d be mine once again come tomorrow The instrumentation is initially spare, rising to an amazing crescendo built around the keyboard - watch the cut-aways on the YouTube track. Jones’ astoundingly tortured vocals are a match for the piano, revealing the futility of the song’s premise. A stunning performance. Come Tomorrow peaked at 24 on the Melbourne charts in 1965,...