What I Cooked Last Night

The hottest summer on record, they said. What a fizzer. Here in Coburg, we did not get through the half-price twenty-visit family ticket for Moreland aquatic centres. Five visits left. Barely any days over 40C. Hottest on record? Hardly. (Incidentally, that 30C-plus day last week was described by several newsreaders as a 'heatwave'. A heatwave used to be a run of high temperature days, but its meaning has been manipulated to indicate a single day of hot weather.) * And here we are at the last day of summer. Tonight: a dish I call warm pasta nicoise, because it contains some of the ingredients of the classic salad. I use linguini for the pasta. Pasta nicoise. Cook the linguine, drain it, and reserve a tablespoon of the liquid. Sear a slice of fresh tuna keeping it still pink in the middle. Cut into cubes. Return the pasta to the heavy pan with the liquid, a dash of olive oil, some very finely sliced onion rings and a crushed garlic clove. Add the tuna, some sliced tr...

I got off to a bad start with eggs. I was nineteen, out of home, and cooking for three. I started with an egg. (Another time I cooked five sausages by placing them into a red hot pan to which they fused. Ten minutes later I had ships of raw sausage meat decks over carbon holds.) I placed the egg in a saucepan and placed the saucepan on the stove and lit the stove. So far so good. Then I went into another room and did something else. I don't know, putting clothes away, reading the sports section, making a landline phone call. Could have been anything. Eight minutes later I came back into the kitchen. I sniffed the air. But it was too late. There was a sudden explosion, like a light globe being shot out. Something hit the ceiling. In fact, a lot of things hit the ceiling, and the upper parts of the walls. And they were all pale yellow. I had forgotten the water. The egg had heated up and exploded. It took me a day to clean the ceiling and I was still finding bits of egg a...

Pasta with onions raises eyebrow; but veal parmigiana stole tomato sauce and cheese, so why can't pasta hijack something more commonly associated with meat dishes? Pasta with onions, red capsicum and anchovies . Chop two large onions into fine rings and saute them in a pan with olive oil. Add a little sugar to help brown them. Meanwhile, bake a red capsicum until the skin chars. Remove from oven, and place in a paper bag to cool. The skin will now be quite easy to peel away. Cut the flesh into strips. While the onions are melting into soft, fragrant brownness, cook the pasta. Slinky, slippery fettuccine works well with this dish. Check the onions again. Do not allow to stick, let alone burn. Add a squeeze of lemon for a dash of acid and give the onions a stir. Drain the pasta. Twirl it into a large serving bowl, add strips of roasted red pepper, several anchovies; and then top with the fried onion.

Yet again we delve back into the archives of Kitchen Hand's head, from his ongoing life as a copywriter in advertising. Every one of these stories is 100% true and accurate, even the slightly exaggerated ones. Only the names have changed. Reminder: language warning, but no worse than in every agency - or construction site for that matter - across the land. * Another morning in the advertising agency. Another awards night over. Another trophy in the cabinet. Another lost night. Another hangover. Another growing feeling of dread about what happened, where it happened, and who it happened to. Another hamburger with the lot from the café over the road, cooked to order on the greasiest part of the grill to soak up as much brain-soothing fat as possible. Another account service person walks into Leopard's office without knocking. Leopard is the creative director whose name was Leonard until he got into advertising. Thinking his name a little tame for a creative director, he emp...

Home made gnocchi makes the manufactured variety taste like footballs. Used footballs. Tough and leathery. Simply fold some flour and an egg through mashed potato, roll into cylinders, flour them and cut them into one-inch lengths. Place on a floured tray until cooking, by dropping them into boiling water. Simple. Never buy the packet ones again, unless you like chewing on old footballs. I made a roux of flour turned through melted butter, added a cup and a half of milk and warmed it on a low heat until thickened. Then I added half a cup of grated cheddar, a large knob of very mature blue cheese and half a cup of parmesan. Add milk if it gets too thick. The resulting bubbling lava was poured over cooked gnocchi which was flecked with chopped parsley and cracked black pepper. The plate was then placed under the griller until the cheese started developing a very appetising golden crust. Probably the finest pasta dish on earth.

January is a good time to work. I often pick up a week or two of freelance work at a number of advertising agencies when their writers are on holidays. Sometimes the agencies are busy, but often there is not a lot to do apart from checking proofs, signing off artwork, advising account executives on basic points of grammar or spelling, going out for coffee at Brunetti's in the city square, browsing the collectable books in Kay Craddock's; that kind of thing. A couple of weeks ago I spent a few days in a large agency with not much to do. While I was waiting to be briefed on a job, I was idly reading through the agency's mission statement. It was a Monday morning and the job, a six page brochure for one of its financial advice clients, would be briefed in at the work-in-progress meeting at ten o'clock in the boardroom. Mission statements are merely long-winded expressions of a strange blend of political correctness and the latest business management fads; and this w...

Once upon a time, butcher shops had blue tiles on the outside, an inwardly slanting main window for easier viewing of the displayed product from the street, and sawdust on the floor. The sawdust, combined with the smell of fresh meat, produced a curiously sweet aroma. The butchers used curly-leaf parsley to decorate the meat trays. The rich green of the parsley muted the sea of red meat and made it more appetising. My mother's parcel of mince steak from R. J. Gilbertson in Puckle Street Moonee Ponds would often contain a few sprigs of the green herb, which would be cooked into the resulting patties. Later, parsley was made obsolete as a garnish after the butchers invented those green plastic edging things. These days, the butcher's window itself has all but disappeared from the streetscape. Greek-style meatballs with parsley and mint. Put 600g of lean minced steak into a large mixing bowl with a cup and a half of finely chopped parsley, half a cup of finely chopped mi...

This Volvo is so old it was built before the Berlin Wall came down. Yet it appears to be brand new. I found it on a used car lot in Alphington. The Volvo, a 740GL model first registered in March 1990, is a time warp. If you are sitting in the back, the glasshouse is so large it is like riding in one of those trans-national railway observation cars. The car handles like a train too. Designed by Volvo legend Jan Wilsgaard , the 740 was poorly regarded by critics at the time of its release: In 1983, Autocar 's Gordon Murray said, "To me it's obscene ... goes right against the grain of what everybody else is trying to do. To me it looks like a European version of a North American car." Murray still didn't like the model in 1990 : Ordinary passenger cars are getting bigger and heavier, and that's an awful trend. If everyone drove around in Volvo (700 series) there'd be no room on the road for you and me! It's ridiculous making these massive cars for pe...

Eight of them came down, hard as rocks, from a friend's farm outside Euroa. They don't all come from Queensland; they grow well just across the Great Divide. Put them in a paper bag with a banana, he said. Ripens them. Ripens the banana, too. Made banana cake when they went soft. Been eating avocadoes for ten days. They came up beautifully. Four days in a paper bag with a banana will do that to you. Creamy and cold, with a perfect interior of pale green, like a 1930s tiled bathroom. I made pasta with avocado, variations of which I have posted many times; the clichéd but delicious guacamole; one, halved and baked, even became a rerun of the 1970s classic avocado vinaigrette. Then there were sandwiches of wholegrain bread with cold sliced chicken and avocado, tomato and cheddar cheese, possibly the best sandwich ever invented. (Toast these in winter and never go back to ham-and-cheese again.) But the best dish with the Euroa avocado consignment was a scotch fillet stea...

Synopsis: Kitchen Hand is visited regularly by a neighbour's badly-named cat whose health is in decline. Another neighbour, who works in animal welfare, intervenes. Now read on. More months passed. Fluffball had fattened up again, but he still limped, and he had lumps around his neck. He used to fight with Lion, a cat who lived in the yard of another neighbour, unrelated to this story. One day, the animal welfare neighbour, whose name is Z., knocked on the door. Z. had a plan. The broad plan was to steal Fluffball. Yes, take him. Kidnap him. Z. would take him to a refuge. But we had to catch him first. He would not voluntarily get into a car and be driven away. He didn't even really like being picked up. He just liked head-butting me. The finer detail of the plan was that Z. would borrow a cage from a shelter. (You can get them from the council, but that takes six months and delivery is about as inconspicuous as riding a pink elephant down Bourke Street.) But she couldn...

The price of a cup of coffee at Coburg’s original and best café, Coffee and Kitchen, has risen for the first time in four years. It is now $2.50. That is not a typo. Coffee and Kitchen caters for the old Coburg crowd; the elderly Greeks and Italians who moved into the suburb in the 1950s and '60s as young factory fodder and are now in their twilight years. The two newspapers most read here are Il Globo and Neos Kosmos ; and, unlike most cafes, the most popular drink served is the short black, leaving the ubiquitous café latte a distant second. Gradually supplanting the old guard of customers at Coffee and Kitchen is a new generation of Coburg families whose children love the milkshakes or kick balls around in the mall while their parents sit outdoors under big market umbrellas in hot weather. But Coffee and Kitchen is still not quite hip enough for the hipsters - ironically, because it is exactly the kind of place foodie experience-seekers travel the world to find: an unpreten...

Another animal story, but this one is highly confidential as it includes cruelty, identity theft, actual theft, kidnapping, lies, trickery, and deception. Tell no-one you have read this. One day two summers ago, a cat walked in my front gate, proceeded up the long driveway, turned left at the pathway that leads to the front door and sat down on the front porch. I watched this happen through the front window and was strangely moved by the cat's nonchalant self-possession. It looked like it had been here before. But I was sure it hadn't. I invited it inside. You don't usually invite cats, you just let them in. But this one had such a debonair personality I felt a more formal approach was appropriate. The cat accepted my invitation and marched in regally, walked to the kitchen and sat down expectantly at the refrigerator. This was a cat that knew what it wanted. I fed it. The cat was a complete male, confident and fat and sleek with soft, small fold-over ears and shifty ...

Greyhounds have quirks, if not outright eccentricities. You have to wonder where they come from; the eccentricities, I mean. Perhaps it is because they have been living with humans for centuries. It is the only dog breed mentioned in the Bible, but that may have been a mis-translation. Our last visitor, Lou , (who gives them these names?) was here during the hot weather. Dogs like to play with their water, so you have to put around multiple sources. If they tip out their water on a 40 degree day they're in big trouble. I used a large plastic basin and two-litre yogurt buckets with handles as backups. Lou would gently nose the handle up to the pick-up position, take it delicately in his jaws, and carry the bucket to another part of the garden, where he would set it down again. Without spilling a drop. He did this all the time. He was self-taught. I have the evidence. I should upload it to YouTube, but the last thing the world wants is another pet video. Like most things, it wo...

Barbecue on a hot night. 1. Roll pieces of salmon through a marinade of soy, ginger and garlic. Wrap in foil adding some of the marinade. Place on grill. Barbecue until the package steams. Serve with coiled glass noodles with sesame oil and stir-fried Chinese broccoli. 2. Lamb chops marinated in olive oil into which you have snipped a handful of fresh rosemary. Serve with cubed potatoes boiled until very soft and then tumbled with chopped spring onion, parsley and a splash of vinegar. 3. Fat pork and sage sausages with a side of red cabbage with apple juice: Fry a couple of chopped medium size onions in oil. Shred one half of a medium red cabbage, add it to the pan and stir gently to coat in oil. Turn the heat down and add a dash of red wine vinegar, a cup of apple juice and a pinch of salt and pepper. Vary the fluid according to the size of the cabbage. Cook 30 minutes, stirring occasionally, reducing a little. When done, top with sour cream and serve alongside the pork and sa...