What I Cooked Last Night

I dunno why it's called Caesar salad (I've heard the reason but I forget), I dunno what the right recipe is, whether it has bacon, whether it should have croutons, whether the eggs should be hard, soft, crumbled, whatever. I just make it every now and again, and I make it different every time. Last night we were given cos from the school garden, so: Rinse the cos, chop it in broad sections and arrange (or throw) in a large salad bowl. Fry some bacon, chopped into small pieces, until crisp. Or until not crisp, doesn't matter, however you like. Boil a couple of eggs. I boiled mine hard. Toss the cooked bacon over the cos. Slice the eggs into sections and place over the cos - that's what I did. Or crumble them and do the same. Make your favourite dressing. I already had some vinaigrette left in the fridge so I put half a teaspoon of mayo in it, added a little lemon juice and some salt and pepper, shook it up and poured it over. Then I sprinkled a s...

I dunno what you call them. Leftover blueye (about half a kilo) and leftover mashed potato means yummy fish burgers for lunch next day. Flake the fish and blend it with the mash with half a cup of flour (I used rice flour because Tracy is having a wheat free stage except when visiting cafes and eating muffins), and egg and salt and pepper. Fry the burgers in a general amount of olive oil (you might prefer a lighter oil) until crispy. Turn over and fry the other side. If you've formed the burgers well, they don't break. If they do, you've formed them badly. No matter, just break 'em up and turn it into fish hash. Yum. When your burgers are cooked, set them on a plate and serve with warm tomato sauce and a squeeze of lemon over the top and a nice green salad on the side.

Fresh from the Victoria Market, Blue Eye cutlets. With mashed potato and green peas. This is a great Friday night meal, simply and homely. We had an entree of mango, green olive and fetta wrapped in prosciutto. Beautiful. The fish grilled in butter and olive oil to a crisp finish. Chilled white wine. Yum. Sleep.

The other night I didn't cook at all. The temperature was in the high thirties (celsius) so we had take-outs from Singh's Indian take-aways, one of the best around. When they opened about fifteen years ago, their vindaloo was so hot people couldn't eat, so they toned it down for local tastes, but you can still order it cranked up if you wish. The guy who ran Singh's used to bring out people from India to cook and ran into a bit of trouble with the Immigration Department for using illegal migrants. They sure were the genuine item. The food was sensational. I hadn't been to Singh's for quite a while, but I remembered what to order: mulligatawny, that hot, seedy, delicious Raj soup creation; Alu Chap, which is curried peas encased in mashed potato and deep fried; a beef vindaloo; a garlic naan and some pappadums. The mulligatawny was redder and more dahl-like than I remember; we slice the alu chap in two and pour the mulligatawny over the top. Yum. The...

The fluid, gravy, jus, mess, whatever you want to call it, left over from the beef and red wine stew below made a very nice ragu with the addition of a can of tomatoes and some frozen peas. Dead simple. Cook it all up and serve it over pasta. Or you can just cook it into some risotto. Equally delicious.

Following my immutable law about buying only what is in season or plentiful, I found some beef on the bone at $6 a kilo. I made a very simple stew with red wine, garlic, a little butter, onions, carrots and potatoes, letting it cook away for a couple of hours until the meat fell off the bone. Then I served it with braised red cabbage (there's plenty of that left in the garden - my family will be getting red cabbages for Christmas) and big gluggy egg noodles - yum. Kind of Alsace style I guess, where French meets German. Goes well with beer. Of course.

The garden is exploding with several varieties of lettuce, broad beans, the last of the broccoli and more. I can't eat fast enough. Take a salad bowl the size of a truck steering wheel and fill it with lettuce, quartered cold boiled potatoes, blanched broccoli, boiled broad beans, quartered hardboiled eggs, olives, rings of salad onion and crown it with a can of tuna and your dressing. (I used a simple, lemon, vinegar, olive oil and a touch of mayo.) Beautiful with fresh bread and a glass of cold white wine. Tomatoes not ready yet so I didn't use any. This salad needs good tomatoes and is insulted with inferior supermarket tomatoes. The lesson is, if it's not good, leave it out.

Take your left over corned beef - you had some left over? Why? - dice it into small pieces, mix it with mashed potato and a little chopped parsley. That's corned beef hash. Now the fun starts. You can add all sorts of things to it. Add heaps of butter and beat it until it glistens. Man that hash is sinfully delicious. Add some mustard for a real taste kick. Add tomato sauce for a reddish hash with a bit of bite. Or worcestershire sauce. Or HP sauce. Add some boiled cabbage for colcannon-like creation. Or leeks. Turn it into hash cakes by frying it up in oil or butter. Superb.

Slice it finely. Rinse it if it is gritty, this normally at the top where it pushes through the earth. Fry some bacon, diced finely, in a little olive oil. Add the leeks after a couple of minutes and a dash of water or white wine. Cover tightly and cook until soft over a very low heat, adding a dash more fluid if it starts to dry out. Keep it nice and moist but not 'wet'. Then add a can of butter beans or some you have cooked. Season and serve as a side dish to a roast, a grill or a barbecue. Great with beer, as is anything involving bacon, beans or leeks. Variation: add cooked cubed potatoes to bulk it out as a main meal.

This is amazingly good. I made it up, it kind of evolved from other pasta dishes I've made. I've made this about a hundred times now and I'm convinced it's one of the best. 1. Place a tablespoon of olive oil and a scored garlic clove in a pan with a close-fitting lid. Place a chicken fillet, just a dash of white wine or water, some sliced red pepper and several sliced medium mushrooms in the pan, and set it on a low heat. It has to be low so it won't burn. The idea is to cook the fillet through without browning it - it kind of poaches. Turn it after a few minutes. Experiment to get it right. 2. Meanwhile set your pasta cooking. Whatever you like. It works well with gnocchi, spaghetti, rigatoni. 3. Throw a cup of peas or snow peas in with the pasta so their cooking time coincides with when the pasta is done. (Remember, snow peas are done in thirty seconds.) 4. Slice an avocado into half and then cut the halves into half-inch segments. 5. When the ch...

With lamb of course. At $7.99 a kilo, it's perfect right now. A small roast in the oven for two hours and it's done nicely. I tossed in a fresh rosemary sprig straight off the bush and a few cloves of garlic. Oops, forgot the potatoes, so I cut them finely, a couple of millimetres only - so they'll cook faster - and threw them in a baking dish with milk, cream, salt, pepper and some more rosemary. (They're also good like this cooked with chicken stock). On the side: broccoli from the garden. Hmmm, running out of ideas for broccoli. And peas. The peas were frozen. That's OK. I served it all up and tossed some mint sauce that I made over it for a delicious tart taste. Never use supermarket mint sauce, always make your own. It's easier. Just pick some sprigs of mint and put them in a jar with vinegar. If it's that easy, why would people waste money and time going to a supermarket to buy mint sauce made in a factory? I dunno. PS: The Cormo Expres...

Around here, everyone eats outside in summer. I wheeled out the big heavy cast iron cooker from the shed and lit the coals. The sun was low and the birds were making a racket in the trees - several massive conifers, a huge pine, a tall apple tree, a couple of plums and some evergreens. It's great just to sit, eat and watch the birds flitting through the trees on a summer night. Last night's recipe: 1. Pick a heap of parsley and mint from the garden. 2. Chop it finely along with an onion and a clove or two of garlic and mix it through the mince along with an egg, a sprinkling of continental flour, the juice of a lemon and a dash of sumac, or use whatever you've got. 3. Form it into kebabs and skewer them. Check the coals. When they're all glowing, start grilling. Serve your kebabs when they're done to your liking in any bread you have - I used soft fresh Lebanese bread from A1 bakery - with sliced tomato, onion and lettuce with a little leben and a ...

What's the secret to asian cooking? Stock. Herbs. That's it. I cooked this soup - vietnamese? malaysian? I dunno, but it was good. Stock for the base flavor and fresh herbs to carry it through. Many people don't understand this, so their interpretation of asian food is to (a) deep-fry or (b) to add sweet sauces. Wrong. Take a stock, add fish, vegetables, meat, whatever, cook with lashings of herbs and you have a great meal. Butterfish. Onions. Garlic. Ginger. Fish stock. Boil it in a big old pot then add noodles and all the herbs you can gather - fresh coriander, dill, chinese basil - and there's dinner. Beanshoots on top after serving. See? Easy. PS: If you don't grow the herbs yourself, go to a market where they'll be cheaper and fresher and not wrapped in plastic. Don't buy them from a supermarket. Just don't.

Rule #1 of gardening: the kitchen garden is never big enough. It stands to reason. If there was extra space you would plant something in it, wouldn't you? And then, being a kitchen garden, it would explode in late spring when everything grows like crazy. Mine has exploded. The bean plants are fully six feet high. The cabbages are huge. I think they're late, so they'll be picked soon to make way for tomatoes. Can you put tomatoes where cabbages have been? I dunno . The mint, the oregano, the dill, all going wild. The spinach I am eating until I turn green. Braise it in olive oil and garlic. Put in some cream and fresh ground pepper. Eat it with veal in vino bianco and die happy. Accompany it with a nice white wine - chardonnay, sauvignon blanc, I dunno, whatever - and die even happier. Uh, oh. The fruit trees are loading up. Watch out.