What I Cooked Last Night

Last time I was in Mexico, a housewife passed on to me the following deceptively simple recipe .... That was never going to work. I've never been to Mexico*, but I kind of like the music, to quote a 1970s songwriter; but he was talking about Spain. This is a deceptively simple recipe, but it works well if you like the intense heat of your chili hit softened by a smoky cocoa and cumin background, like a Gulf breeze rolling across the Yucatan peninsula. Chili con carne. Brown 500g of beef mince in a little oil. Remove. Dice an onion and saute in the same pan with a little more oil. Dice a red capsicum, crush a clove of garlic, chop one, two or three small hot chili(s) and add these to the softened onion. Cook a minute or two. Add a tablespoon of cumin powder, two teaspoons of coriander, and half a teaspoon each of cinnamon and cocoa powder. Stir to combine. Add the cooked mince, two tablespoons of tomato paste and a cup of vegetable or beef stock or plain water. Stir and co...

Now let me get this straight. The federal government refused to hand over a fistful of dollars (yours and mine) to the Shepparton Preserving Company so the canner could build, I don't know, some new sheds? A mechanised fruit picker? A bin for peach and apricot pits? A new office for the managing director? Despite this obvious, sensible and prudent move, the Victorian government's premier, Dr Denis Napthine*, stepped into the dispute and handed over $22 million (yours and mine, but only if you live in Victoria) to the 'embattled' canner for product 'development', embattled meaning no-one is buying its tins of fruit any more. Now to the point. I went to the supermarket. Rows and rows of cans with convenient ring-pull tops. Then the SPC cans of fruit. No ring-pull tops. You have to rattle around in your kitchen drawer and find a manual can opener (I also have an electric one dating to the 1960s in my collection of kitchen oddities) and physically open your c...

They are coming in all at once, clusters of orbs changing overnight from pale green to orange and then to red: not burgundy red or crimson or any one of a number of other reds, but that unique red of ripe tomatoes that is as warm and deep the sun dropping into the Indian Ocean, a sight I have not seen since the great autumn of 1988 and, before that, the seminal coming of age summer of 1971/2, when Australian cricket spawned a new sensation, the moustached fast bowler named Lillee who would inspire, both in style and in facial hair, another sensation forty-one years later. That was exhausting to write so I can imagine how it reads. Yes, it's Bulwer-Lytton time again; the competition that asks you to write the opening sentence of the worst-ever novel. Shouldn't be hard: just read the average corporate mission statement or the introduction to a bureaucrat's PowerPoint presentation. * The crop had not looked great, but that changed last week. Most are cherry tomatoes, bes...

Postage stamps used to depict noteworthy individuals such as queens, explorers or generals; or significant events such as the hundredth anniversary of the invention of the combine harvester. Not any more. Australia Post has just released a new series of stamps portraying celebrity chefs, obviously having decided that these people do not get enough exposure via television, radio, newspapers, weblogs, Facebook, Twitter, and life-size cardboard cut-outs in supermarkets. The subjects for the stamps include Neil Perry, who once franchised his name to cardboard packets of airline food, Kylie Kwong and some others whose names I forget. Octogenarian Margaret Fulton features as the token ‘retro’ food celebrity, which is like serving ironic lamingtons at your dinner party. There is a sense of clichéd obviousness about this, as there is about most of popular culture. It would have been far more interesting to depict some of Australia’s unknown chefs. Chefs who had never been on television, ...

One very hot day in January. The main street of Daylesford was like Sorrento. Audis backing out of angle parking spots, BMWs indicating one way then turning another, people with phones glued to their ears jumping out onto the road in front of traffic, jam-packed cafes called 'Bocconcini', that kind of thing. I had wanted to stop and go into the double-storey bookshop next to the bank, but decided to come back another time when half of Melbourne wasn't visiting. I drove straight through and down the hill, past the right turnoff to the top lake (unsignposted despite being Daylesford's best attraction) and turned left to the lower lake. Two kilometres and another turnoff. Past a gate was a caravan park office and several old caravans, including one painted bright green. Over the caravans, gum trees held thick pale limbs in the air. I camped here under one once and worried it was going to drop a branch on me. In the near distance, glimpses of cool water - Jubilee Lake - c...

44 degrees? Poolside . Children splashing. Lunch on the lawn under an ancient peppercorn tree. The 14-year drought meant there had been little grass for years in places like this; now it is as lush as you like. Not all that many people here. This place used to be packed in summers long gone. I suspect many children are parked in front of air conditioners and screens. This is heading towards an "in my day" harangue so let's leave it right there. And anyway, it's 46 degrees in Adelaide today. That's Celsius. Or Centigrade, as it used to be known. Dinner that last hot night was risotto using 75/25 rice and lentils with a lot of garlic and onion and a little cumin for a dish that might have originated from slightly further around the Mediterranean. Served with sectors of ice-cold truss tomatoes and sprinkled with lemon juice for ample acid bite against the warmth of the cumin. Sensational on a hot night. Cold white wine to accompany. And so, chilled leftover ris...

I used to. No more. Napoli sauce is easier and faster than going to the supermarket for a jar of Barilla or whatever it was I used to buy. Dice an onion and cook it in a decent glug of olive oil and a splash of white wine. Drop in a chopped clove of garlic when onion is almost soft. Cook until just soft; do not brown, much less burn. Now add a tin or two of diced tomatoes, a dash of dried basil or a few leaves of fresh and salt and pepper. Don't be timid: pepper makes this. I put in half a teaspoonful per tin of tomatoes. I also add half a tablespoonful of butter for richness and a small dash of cumin powder. Half a teaspoon of sugar balances the acid. Simmer, adding a little water to maintain sauce-like consistency. I always add a little milk to round out the creaminess towards the end. Perfect on La Triestina giant spinach and ricotta ravioli. (Cooked well, they expand to the size of a playing card.)

Several Christmases ago, I was giving an average five goats or wells to Third World villages in lieu of receiving gifts from friends. The number dwindled in recent years; and this year, none. The chattering classes seem to have given up on sanctimonious and conspicuous charity dressed up as Christmas cheer. So why do I feel guilty? Every gift I unwrapped this year brought visions of a Third World villager peering to the horizon for a goat who would never come. Happy new year to all.

... will not be on my Christmas table this year. I'm going back to basics.

That kale was useful in other ways. I ran out of the usual greens for pesto, so I took several fronds of kale (examining carefully for bugs), the rest of the coriander that had run to seed in the blink of an eye (actually, two weeks from maturity) and a handful of parsley also running to seed. The rest of the pine nuts and a few almonds, some garlic just out of the ground last week, half a cup of olive oil, and half a cup of grated hard cheese. Plenty of pepper and salt. Blitz. Cook the fettucine (green and red for a little jaded year-end colour), boil cubes of sweet potato, drain the pasta, fold through sweet potato with a little olive oil. Top with a tablespoon of sour cream and the pesto on that. More grated parmesan. Heaven.

The only catch? It's made of dandelion. When I was growing up we had Bushell's Chicory Essence in the cupboard. And Tracy used to drink Caro, which at least looks like coffee. Don't see why we shouldn't try dandelion.

A new ad for a chicken company boasts that its chickens get to run around in the sun and climb ramps. (Then they have their heads cut off and are plucked, but that's later.) The fate of chickens is something of a national obsession, which is why chicken producers are hitting back with images of farmyard bliss, where every fowl is happy, for three months. The producers are on the defensive from chicken freedom fighters, a loose axis of lobby groups battling for territorial expansionism to allow chickens to walk, Rousseau-like, away from the confines of their crowded cages and into a solitude and peace they might not otherwise know. But are chickens their own worst enemy? After giving chickens access to open space via doors leading from their barn to freedom, one major producer found the chickens were actually refusing to venture outside, preferring to sit in their stalls or scratch about in the dirt inside the barn. The freedom fighters hit back, demanding the ungrateful chick...

I started this weblog ten years ago. It was meant to be an online filing system for recipes, because I didn't want to end up with 10,000 yellowing newspaper tear-outs all over the kitchen, which is what happened to this recipe hoarder . I didn't even have comments then, and introduced the feature later in case I wanted to make footnotes to entries. It was a good time to start a weblog, because they were new, and so people sought them out and read them, and I was lucky enough to gain a few readers; one or two or maybe three of which still visit and comment occasionally. Today, because there are so many, it would be next to impossible to open a weblog and attract visitors without publicity, which kind of misses the point. I can imagine Twitter going the same way when everyone has a Twitter account and less time to read everyone else's. One of the first recipes I posted was a simple Asian-style soup of butterfish fillets cooked in stock with onions, garlic, ginger, herbs a...

I spent my early-1970s schooldays covering the empty space in my exercise books with words designed in flower power fonts, using, alternately, an Osmiroid fountain pen and a Ballograf ballpoint pen. There were three reasons for this floral typographical occupation. The first was that such fonts were widespread and very popular then, especially on record album cover art. The letters were beautiful, voluptuous, infinitely variable and very accessible. The second reason was that Form Two schoolwork was so boring it made watching paint dry look like the last quarter of the 1970 grand final or even the pre-match entertainment (if there was any then). I spent hours crafting type while the teacher went on about wool production in the Western District or the Atherton Tablelands, or the Roman who cast his hand into the fire of a brazier. Had Twitter or smart phones been invented then I might never have developed an appreciation for typefaces. I might also have grown up with the memory span...