What I Cooked Last Night

Greater Dandenong Council Mayor Angela Long said (reported Herald Sun, 24 August) police tape had proved ‘futile’ in stopping children going to playgrounds. She will support removing the swings - literally out of the ground - and asking for increased police patrols. Dandenong is a migrant suburb with poor housing stock and a high percentage of units, flats and apartments with no play areas. Play-starved children craving recreation have no other options. Mayor Long said, ‘I’m supportive of taking swings down if it’s to save children’s lives.’ Next day, Dr Seamus Jones of East Geelong wrote (Herald Sun, 25 August), ‘Damaging the younger generations to protect ourselves is ...  immoral. ... heartless and selfish. ... one day (we can) look back at this time ... as the only nation that hid behind its children.’ Herald Sun front page headline, 28 August: Teen Toll: Top Doc Reveals Devastating Health Scars on our Young.

  ' ... but old dogs and children and watermelon wine'. - Tom T. Hall 1936-2021

2021, somewhere near Boston. Ben Turnbull lives in a big old house with a number of empty rooms and attics with creaking pipes. His wife is busy with committees. Ben Turnbull survived the Sino-American war. Many didn’t. This is the aftermath. The west coast is unreachable; wiped out. Entrepreneurs are making brave talk about reinhabiting China’s radioactive wastelands. Parts of New York lie in ruins. China's bombs didn't reach that far: Chinese Americans, sympathetic to China, were responsible. (This book - for it is a novel - was written four years before 2001.) Local thugs ransom Ben Turnbull for property protection. He pays. There are no police. Ben lapses in and out of time-warp consciousness; becoming at one point a monk in 793 Britain during a Viking attack on their territorially-valuable island during which the other monks are slaughtered. He sees the head monk depart along with the invaders. Traitor? No, when they pass a fence, he perceives the monk’s head is on a pike....

The cookbook must have dated from the 1970s, if not earlier; but I could not ascertain this, as the title page with publication details on the reverse had been torn out or lost somewhere along the way. But you can carbon-date a cookbook by the names of its recipes and, sometimes, its typography. Not to mention, of course, its rich heritage of photography which in the case of the 1970s featured chocolate brown glazed soup tureens, Byzantine-style green-coloured stem glassware, tapestry tablecloths and stained glass lamps casting a multi-hued glow over the chunky candle-laden refectory tables.  The book I had in my hands featured 'Apricot-Glazed Ham Steaks', 'Pork Roly Poly' and 'Chicken in a Pot' among its quaintly-named dishes. The book was one of those community efforts with each recipe contributed by an individual. One recipe was 'Virginian Chicken'. Why Virginian? Was it first cooked at Shiloh Ranch? Or featured in an early episode of the TV series? I...

The road led north out of town on a vast hard plain pointing straight towards Australia's dead heart. We had emerged onto this flat superhighwayish landscape out of a series of curving roads through gulch, valley, pass, fissure; the land fractures that yielded 1850s Bendigo gold, whose evidence still lines that city's main streets. I drove the B-roads via Heathcote and Axedale to avoid linear Bendigo's endless stoplights and because I prefer B-roads anyway. The houses along the northbound highway grew fewer, then the big industrial yards and warehouses muscled in, like in every other outer-suburban industrial wasteland in the world. A steel fabricator's warehouse, a wool-buyers' yard, a refrigeration works. Open fields, and then a lonely church, its sign recommending:  Let Jesus Carry the Burden 1 Peter 5-7, in three different typefaces. A larger sign on the next property, a farm machinery sale yard, proclaimed:  Kubota: This Is the Life, which was almost as spiri...

That clichéd Russian casserole dish from what, the 1950s? 1970s? had been in the oven for several hours the other day, using cubed gravy beef, rather than strips of whatever: fillet? scotch? rump?  Anyway, the whole thing is a sham. Onions, mushrooms and wine were not in an early Russian recipe. On the other hand, cubed beef - rather than strips to be sautéed - were. Who cares about genuine? In the 1960s they invented manufactured stroganoff mix, in a packet. They sold millions. Convenience food.  I had shaken the cubed beef in a sealed bag with enough flour to coat it and enough paprika to colour the flour. And salt. And pepper. Then I had sealed the beef in oil in an open pan, transferring it to a casserole with a scattering of marjoram, and then sautéing a couple of thinly sliced onions in the same pan with some halved button mushrooms, before removing them to the casserole. Then a good amount of white wine and beef stock had been sloshed into the pan to coax out the cooked...

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...