What I Cooked Last Night

The following recipe is Greek-derived but since there's a lemon tree in every Australian back yard - at least there used to be - this is as Australian as the other Australian back yard icon - the Hills Hoist (also rapidly disappearing). Grilled lemon meatballs. Put 750 grams of mixed veal and pork mince into a large mixing bowl. Use your hands to mix through an egg, 100 grams of grated parmesan cheese, three chopped garlic cloves, half a chopped red onion and three tablespoons of chopped parsley. To the meat mixture, add the juice and the grated zest of one large lemon. Add salt and pepper and divide the mixture into golf-ball size orbs. Flatten them slightly and grill until done to your liking. Or you can do it Greek-style by putting them between two lemon leaves (the idea being to stop them charring prematurely over an open fire as well as to add more lemon flavour via the oil in the leaves). This is a good alternative to the usual patties, the lemon adding a refreshing...

Very few tomatoes this year. And another thing: white flies are everywhere, or are they something else? Everything has holes in it. The new acanthus (planted last year from neighbourhood seeds) leaves are like colanders. The parsley is all pitted. Even the normally untouchable geraniums (which are really pelargoniums) are shot to bits. I don't want to spray unless I can find something that won't kill the spiders, ladybirds, etc. This garden warfare is too hard. I might concrete the whole lot. My father started doing that back in the sixties; covered probably 30% of the yard in concrete to make riding space for our bikes. Meanwhile, you still can't beat fresh pasta with garden tomatoes and ricotta for a summer meal. The dish makes itself. Cook pasta; slice tomatoes; press a garlic clove into serving dishes to impart flavour; top cooked pasta with tomatoes and a drizzle of olive oil; top with ricotta; scatter fresh basil leaves over. Crack pepper over the lot. I've ju...

Bureaucrat Jerril Rechter tells of her descent into addiction: "It's a habit I fell into easily. ... every evening after work, I'd go home and sit down to a refreshing tonic water and lime. It's just what I did at the end of a day." Yes. There is no 'gin' in that sentence. The VicHealth CEO was hooked on tonic water , or possibly the lime; and every new year was a hellish groundhog day: " ... every year on January 1, I'd resolve to reduce (sugary drinks) from my diet. And every year, by January 31, I'd have given in to my habit." One heroic month without tonic and lime, and then back on the turps. Rehab? Counselling? Cold turkey? No. Rechter's own organisation comes to the rescue. "I finally managed ... by signing up to our H30 Challenge, committing to swap every energy drink for water for 30 days." Enter the cucumber: "I also found it helped to have a jug of water infused with cucumber and mint or lime and ginger chil...

From the top: Alexandra at just under 2; William at 2; Thomas at just under 2 (wearing my running shoes). Or is it at William the top, Thomas in the middle and Alex below? No, wait ...

Picture in post below resized for readability.

(Click to enlarge.) Roz Chast's illustrations of domestic desperation are like hand grenades with fool-proof pins. There's TNT in there but it never goes right off. Her characters keep a lid on it somehow. Satire or reality? My mother has every one of those teas. Not that she's a foodie: far from it. People keep giving them to her. 'Gourmet' teas seem to have achieved a kind of exotic attraction beyond their actual composition and have become the default gift - like aromatherapy kits about twenty years ago - for old ladies who have, or have had, everything. My mother's tea collection sits at one end of the kitchen bench, in a corner near the stove. The tea, loose or in bags, is in tins with lids, tins without lids, spilling out of opened boxes, packed in unopened boxes, piled up in wicker baskets and just laying loose, a tea mountain which occasionally collapses with outcrops of organic, fair trade, single estate, sustainable, ethical and socially responsi...

The boys were convinced Ishant Sharma works part-time as a security guard in Coles. They saw him there several times when we were shopping after school. But he wasn't there while the first test was on. That was proof enough for the two boys. "Why don't you ask him?" I said. "And find out once and for all?" They haven't seen him since; but we are in the middle of the second test right now. He must be in Brisbane. This incident mirrors what happened to my younger brother when he visited India years ago, and was accosted by scores of young Indian boys, who asked him if he was Australian, and then if he was Geoff Lawson; as if one followed the other logically. If you're an Aussie, you must be Geoff Lawson. * Recipe for a hot summer night: Sweet potato with chick peas and pine nuts. Peel two large sweet potatoes, cut the flesh into centimetre cubes, and cook until just tender. Meanwhile, heat through two drained cans of chickpeas. Toast hal...

Titles roll. Music. Scene one: day Tableau : the ancient shed at the end of the yard leans to the east. It was built in the 1940s, a simple rectangular steel frame with sheet-iron walls and a corrugated roof. It has one door, no window, and no light, because power was never connected. It is pitch black inside. You prop open the north-facing door to admit light. This works best in winter when the sun is further north, slanting in. Action : I enter screen left and pull open the crooked shed door. Ancient hinges complain. My eyes become accustomed to the darkness, and a great shape can be made out in the corner: a hulk of cast iron on wheels. Covered in dust, it resembles an abandoned steam train in some long-forgotten rail yard shed. Tracking shot : I somehow I drag it out into daylight. Locked-off camera : I hose the dust off the iron horse, and exit screen right. It dries in the warm air. Scene two: evening Against a painted backdrop of a line of ornamental pear trees and a...

It was one of Australia's greatest speeches ever made. That makes two in five days: by one man. "The same blades of grass ... the same stands ... the same fence ..."

Now that’s funny. After mentioning Lobby Loyde, Melbourne guitar legend (except he was real) somewhere the other day, an article in last weekend's newspaper quoted his opinion on the late television music show, Countdown . Countdown commenced in 1974, replacing the excellent un-hosted GTK . Why do you need a host? Just play the music and cut out the middle man. I did not like Countdown . I didn't like the mostly rubbish music acts; the live screaming teen audience that yelled the same high-decibel hysteria for every performance no matter how good or bad; the jabbering host who was always one jaw-drop away from actual dribbling; and the terrible theme music, if you could call it that. In other words, I was a music snob. Or was I? I looked up Thomas J. Guest’s very important reference work, Thirty Years of Hits: Melbourne Top 40 Research , to see if the music at that time was as bad as I remembered. Turning to the year Countdown first screened, 1974, I ran my eye d...

Why would I stop my children playing cricket? Every time we exit the cricket ground, I have to shepherd them against the mad drivers in the car park that also services the main street shops. It is those idiot shoppers, not the sportsground patrons, who drive like possessed demons. Not the ute-driving cricketers or footballers; but the four-wheel-drive mothers who aren’t looking because they’re staring into devices, or who think they are bulletproof in the massive vehicles they cannot control properly; or who are just too plain stupid to care about pedestrians. Meanwhile, a prayer for Phil Hughes .

Photograph taken by my father, 1970. Cnr Mt Alexander Road and Ormond Rd, Moonee Ponds.

After last Sunday's thrilling finish to the Phillip Island 400, the boys got to work with their HBs. The Polestar is a beautiful piece of machinery, its sculpted lines reminiscent of the hulking powerhouse racing cars of decades gone by. Garry Rogers of Garry Rogers Motorsport, whose driver Scott McLaughlin stole Sunday's race in the last straight, posted the resulting pictures here . Well done boys. Now it's a hard career decision: commercial artist or racing driver. Hmmmmm. (Herge, who wrote and illustrated the Tintin series, started out as an illustrator in the automotive industry.)