What I Cooked Last Night

There was a little sun as high morning swung into early afternoon. I sat at the kitchen table. The radio sat on the fridge, Off the Record playing the result of a station survey about the best songs ever recorded in Melbourne. There had been three opened rice paper packs in the bottom drawer. It's one of my pet hates, several of something all open at the same time. I had them on the table, along with chicken thigh fillets poached in garlic and a few drops of soy, capsicum, carrot, cooked rice noodles, beanshoots - and a jar of that Vietnamese dipping sauce that tastes like what a rollercoaster feels like to a teenager. A massive salt attack followed by a sugar plunge with a chilli chaser. I had hot water in a shallow bowl to soften up the rice paper, and a damp teatowel to roll them on. Brian Wise on RRR-FM played the predictable Daddy Cool, Spectrum and Skyhooks songs and then announced the number one, towards midday, as a controversial choice: From St Kilda to King's Cross , ...

That Top 100 was meant to demonstrate the sheer arbitrariness of list-making. An example: I deliberated over No. 2 before choosing the Aretha Franklin version of Lucky Old Sun over Ray Charles’. Why? I don't know. Something to do with that old novel title, the singer not the song Later I found as good a performance of Stardust as Nat King Coles’. Ultimately all of this is inexplicable human subjectivity and it changes day to day, like moods or seasons.

Last weekend's front page Covid story led off its third paragraph with: 'Friday marked another grim milestone ...' . Bodies piling up in the streets blocking the view of jaunty kangaroos bouncing along in the distance? Black-hatted cart drivers, medieval-style, yelling 'Bring out your dead'? No. The sentence continued: ' ... with 97 new cases recorded.' 97 Covid infections in New South Wales is another grim milestone? More than half of Australia - 14 million people - are currently under house arrest. No, wait. It has just gone 3 o'clock Tuesday. The following breaking news just hit the ticker (the radio speaker in my case): South Australia has recorded a new locally acquired case on Tuesday as the state is plunged into a full lockdown. One new case - later revised up to four - and the entire population of South Australia has been placed in lockdown. So add almost two million more people to the 14 million above. The South Australian premier, greedily pur...

Fusion or confusion? This melding of a cliched Italian staple with an English-style slow-cooked beef casserole results in my favourite winter dish ever . Take a kilogram of gravy beef (shin beef in Britain), cut it into 5cm pieces, flour and season it and brown it in olive oil - in batches - in a large pan. Set it aside in a big round casserole dish. Add a finely chopped onion to the vacated pan and stir until soft. Add a garlic clove and a sprig of fresh thyme and stir until aromatic. (Add more oil as necessary.) Add the beef back to the pan, along with a can of diced tomatoes, a cup of beef stock, half a cup of wine (red or white - I used white), and bring almost to the boil. Transfer to the casserole, place it in a low oven (150-160 celsius) and let it burble away quietly for three hours. (The gravy beef, laden with gelatine, will separate on prodding it with a roasting fork after the long slow cooking process.) When almost ready to serve, cook 250g of ravioli, which is about ha...

Saturday night, went down to Melbourne Kebab Station for some insta-grilled chicken and Adana wrapped in Turkish bread that floated through thin air like cotton wool it was so fresh. Folded all through with lettuce, tomato, fresh cut onion and squirts of garlic and chilli sauce for flavour and aroma overpower. The air is cold and the music is hot; the music of the perfect kebab. An extra loaf of Turkish bread right out of the oven, black seeds burning. Take it home and feast. Red wine. Saturday night.  Sunday morning. Leftovers. Magic Carpet Ride on the radio. The bread had been the size of a flat pillow, and there’s still over half left. Cut into small squares and make a dipping sludge of leftover potato mash welded with olive oil, a ground garlic clove, plenty of salt and pepper and some thick yogurt. Then out into the chill air with the basic picnic watching the kids play football, one eye on the steel sky.  Eight degrees. Wind. Garlic-swept bread. Heaven. Winter.

Prominent on the front of the Sanitarium brand peanut butter jar: Made in Australia since 1898. In small type on the back of the jar: Made in Australia from 0% Australian ingredients.

‘ ... sometimes it is necessary to protect the superfluous in order to preserve the necessary.' Given the level of cancellation currently swirling around the Western world, the US Supreme Court’s admonition last week was timely.

One of our two cars was stolen out of the driveway a week ago. It was an old Camry, but Toyotas never stop.  To replace it, I'd been to Ringwood on Friday and nearly bought an Avalon, and Williamstown the day before and nearly bought a Holden Viva, and prior to that I'd spent a day's due diligence on Carsales. I made a shortlist. On Saturday morning I took the freeway south. It was a nice morning, pale sun breaking through. It was the second day out of that fourth C19 shutdown thing, and Melbourne was catching up with itself on yet another groundhog freedom day. Off the Record's tunes were floating around inside the car, gold and shimmering notes bouncing off the windows in the winter freeway sun streaming through the glass as the car slipped past Toorak, Malvern East, and Chadstone. In between the music the RRR-FM announcer was interviewing Jerry Douglas, who was saying the studio - RCA's famous Studio B - in which the album was recorded could be heard in the music...

Google: there it is, waiting silently and patiently in your device, like an English butler, to tell you everything you want to know. In the old days, you would ask your wise grandmother. Now, she probably gets her information from the internet as well. Example: feeling unwell? Look up your symptoms, then go to the doctor and tell him what's wrong with you. Saves time. Then there's cooking. Everyone googles their dinner. The other night I made Cornish pasties. I had a bit of a look around online. Everyone was saying theirs was 'authentic', as if they had an aunt who had been married to a Cornish miner who liked carrying unwrapped food in his pocket to eat three hours later when he was two hundred feet underground digging up tin. The multitude of online recipes for Cornish pasties insisted variously on skirt, chuck or rib-eye steak; swede or turnip (apparently the same thing in some places); carrot; black or white pepper; potato diced or sliced; frozen peas; thyme; rosema...

Yes, of course, the ex-farm girl had killed, plucked and gutted the chickens, boning the meat and setting the giblets aside for soup, without batting an eye. The chickens had been purchased for that very purpose, but they’d been around long enough (for fattening up; not that a bantam gets very fat) to have earned names. There was more to the story. I've omitted some characters. There was another child at the small kitchen table. My grandfather's sister Mary had died, leaving a ten-year-old son to an unreliable father who turned him over to his mother-in-law. My grandfather took them both into his household, formally adopting the child. So his mother (my great-grandmother) is at the table as well, or more likely in the easy chair near the stove. Rearrangement of the single-fronted Edwardian terrace occurred. My grandfather flew around with a hammer and timber and cement sheeting, and Len and his cousin/adoptive brother Robert migrated to the new sleepout (translation: bungalow) ...

She was sitting in the sun, and her mind rolled back down the decades to the days, when war had ended, of repair and gladness and sadness and regrowth. The sun warmed her, and she told the story. Winny was named after Winston Churchill, and Dynon after the great North Melbourne captain and centreman. Winny and Dynon were small bantam hens. It was 1947. Postwar optimism was co-mingled with severe shortages in materials, building supplies, clothing and food. It was called austerity. Australians were packing food parcels and sending them off to Britain - great and wonderful Britain - source of our laws and our stoicism and our culture and our ... recipes. Len was twelve. He was my mother's younger brother. The bantam hens were his, and they lived in the back yard of the single-fronted terrace in Ascot Street, Ascot Vale, directly across from the racecourse, which had recently been turned over to public housing. Bantams can fly. It would have been easy for them to escape. Len restraine...

I’m no vegetarian; I just like eating them (vegetables, not vegetarians). The following salad - or perhaps it is a stew - is based on those small purple eggplants you find in Italian and Middle Eastern greengrocers, and builds on these with sweet-acid tomatoes, earthy pine nuts, and salty brined olives and capers. To make it, I cubed about 750g worth of purple eggplant, placed it in a colander, and sprinkled it with a good handful of salt for an hour, before rinsing it off and frying it in batches in olive oil. Then I drained the fried eggplant on paper towels. Meanwhile, I had fried a chopped onion in another pan and, when almost done, added a dozen pitted and chopped Sicilian green olives, a small handful of capers, a punnet of those mini tomatoes about the size of the olives, a cubed celery heart, and a big handful of pine nuts. I cooked all of this for five minutes or so, adding a little more oil. Then into the fragrant vegetable/nut mixture went the fried eggplant, followed by a t...

That list was torture. For every song there were ten others as good. Probably twenty. You can't squeeze them all in. Where were Roy Hamilton, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Al Green, Jim Morrison, Chuck Berry, Neil Young (‘Out on the Weekend’ was bumped for something else), and Willie (‘Blue Eyes Cryin' in the Rain’) Nelson? Where was Van Morrison? (His stunning mindscape ‘On Hyndford Street’ from Hymns to the Silence was in an early draft of the 100.)  Christ Almighty, WHERE WAS RAY CHARLES? AND JIMI HENDRIX? (I tossed a coin for No. 2 - 'Lucky Old Sun' - and Aretha Franklin's version beat Ray Charles'. And where were Randy ('One Day I'll Fly Away') Crawford, Nina Simone, Gladys Knight, Karen Carpenter, Ella Fitzgerald, Ketty ("Love Letters") Lester and Patsy Cline? The obvious top 100 habituees (Rolling Stones, Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Who and others) are on everyone else's, so they didn't need to be in my inconsequentia...

Happy 80th birthday, Robert Allen Zimmerman.