What I Cooked Last Night

For seemingly months now, since the last rolls of Christmas wrap were pensioned off in discount bins, supermarket entrances have been lined with tinsel-wrapped chocolate rabbits standing in rows and staring at entering customers like mute soldiers. People have generally been sensible enough not to buy them yet, but occasionally one gets dragged off its cardboard sentry box and thrown unceremoniously into a trolley, never to see the light of day on Easter morn. Hot cross buns are a little further in, near the bread wall; but in their own racks, like a baked goods minority sect. They seem to be selling better than the rabbits, but there must be plenty thrown out. They won't keep until Good Friday. I prefer to wait for Easter for Easter things, but even so I won't be buying any hot cross buns from any supermarket. I have my sources and they are not far from home. One Eastery thing, however, does come early for me. Of course, smoked cod is available all year round but I associate i...

There comes a time when you cook for yourself again, instead of cooking for children and eating their leftovers. Then you regress. It's one step forward and two steps back, most of the time. (Was that a song?) One evening last week William and Thomas had been packed off to bed, having eaten good dinners of spaghetti and meatballs made with mushrooms and cheese and diced zucchini and oatmeal and silence had descended on the house, hesitantly, like a reversing moon module trying not to stir up the dust. A small dark brick of rare roast beef was sitting on the board, resting prior to my carving it, and its ex-oven aromas were twisting around each other in the air like invisible double helices, radiating nucleotides of red wine, garlic, pepper and herbs through the house and to our waiting olfactory cells, which obligingly passed the news on to the cortex, which translated this into plain English as: "Dinner ready, smells good, eat now!" Then crash! went a door. And crash! we...

They grew from seeds that survived the compost, so I don't know their varieties, apart from the Queensland Blue Heeler. No, wait ... that's a dog.

Suddenly, green. St Patrick's Day was just a coincidence. Yesterday, I noticed green everywhere. Patches of it spreading across lawns, parks, nature strips. Perhaps the yellowing foliage is assisting the illusion. But a week or two of reasonably consistent rain is the real reason. Plants are resilient, some more than others. And so, following a summer vicious beyond belief, below are the top five garden plants for surviving in the heat, as judged by an expert panel of one. In 5th place: the pumpkin vine. Long vines grew out of small sections of garden, snaked up supports and across lawn and their broad foliage was like layers of parasols for the caravan of fruit that sprouted below. Ingenious and fascinating. Harvesting continues. We're up to a dozen. In 4th place: viburnum. Heatwave? What heatwave? They do get some shelter in the afternoon and so lose points for that unfair advantage. In 3rd place: weigela. One of the legion shrubs that are sadly ignored these days in fav...

Liver is out of fashion. It should not be. This delicacy is consistently cited by nutritionists for its easily-absorbed iron and vitamins of various letters of the alphabet. It is also delicious when cooked in the right way, i.e., not overdone. It is also inexpensive, a factor that is starting to trump fashion. I bought a calves liver for $3 at Victoria Meats, one of several very good butchers at the top of Sydney Road, a precinct that now beats the Brunswick end of the street pointless for value and variety. * As the onions in the following recipe melt down with the lemon juice, wine and nutmeg, the resulting aroma will have your neighbours at the door if you're not careful. Lock it from the inside before you start. Chop three onions finely and fry them on low heat in half butter and half olive oil - about a tablespoonful of each - to the point of translucence. Add a cup of white wine (that cleanskin from Dan Murphy's is just fine) and the juice of a lemon. Grate some nutmeg i...

You read it everywhere. It's a cliche, a platitude, an unoriginal idea. It goes like this: Did you know if you cut out that cup of coffee every day, you will save six million dollars over fifty years on the average eighty trillion dollar mortgage? (My figures, and not to scale.) The banks have been parroting it for years in their puff pieces about how you could sack your mortgage in a puff of smoke if you follow their cost-cutting tips (and take out an expensive mortgage offset account or wealth package). Now that there's a recession, the newspapers have discovered the idea. Do you really need that cup of coffee? they challenge chirpily, as if we had been living under a rock. I read it again yesterday and I will read it again tomorrow and next week and the week after that, ad infinitum. Or at least until there are no newspapers any more, which is looking extremely likely, because advertising is drying up, fewer actual newspapers are being sold and no-one pays for online conten...

I was in the canned vegetables aisle of the supermarket looking for some capers. There they were on the top shelf: two brands to choose from. The first jar's front label read: Sandhurst Fine Foods Baby capers in wine vinegar Underneath that: Sandhurst The All Australian Company The back label read: Sandhurst Fine Foods Italian Specialities made for Australian tastes! And underneath that: Product of Morocco The second brand revealed that the capers were made in Australia from imported ingredients. How do they do that?

Thomas, 2009, at home. Kitchen Hand, c.1959, Alexandra Gardens, Melbourne.

Early summer evening after a hot day last week. I looked out the kitchen window at a parched lawn and beyond that, the old green shed that leans and the rose climbing over it and behind that a line of heat-singed twelve-foot lilly pillies along the back fence. In the middle of the the lawn was a garden table and around the table were William and Thomas and their much older sister and their sister's friend and Tracy. On the table was a setting for dinner, several glasses of wine, a large salad bowl, an assortment of childrens' books and two plastic wind-up steam engines called Percy and Gordon. I had an old Essteele pan on the left front burner of the stove. I always used to buy Essteele until the lid handle surrounds started cracking and falling off after they moved production off-shore and the company's new advertising line became Proudly designed in Italy . But made somewhere else. In the pan was olive oil, six or seven very finely chopped garlic cloves and a couple of d...

It was lunchtime. I sat in the window of a Swan Street cafe with a chicken and salad sandwich on Schwob's multigrain and looked out at the grime. Of Richmond's three main east-west streets, Swan Street has changed least in twenty-five years. There are new shops and too-expensive cafes in which to waste your money, of course. In fact, only two retail tenants remain from twenty-five years ago when I first frequented this street; and they are next to each other - Bertie the butcher and the Commonwealth Bank, except the bank was the State Bank in those days. But Swan Street has the same down-at-heel atmosphere it had when I used to stroll up here from Church Street for lunch in 1983. That's not to say it has no charm. The Dimmey's building is still interesting, even though it looks like it hasn't been cleaned since Richmond football club last won a premiership. In the early 1980s there was another department store - Ball's - at the other end of the street, on the co...

It was twenty-six years ago yesterday: February 16, 1983. Ash Wednesday. I was at home in the evening with my children - William and Thomas’s much older brother and sister - at the small Carlton terrace house in which we lived from 1979 to 1985. Much older brother was six; sister had turned three three days earlier. They were in bed, asleep. Their mother was at a concert at Hamer Hall or the State Theatre or whatever it was called in 1983. I sat in my favourite chair with its polished timber arms and green brocade and wondered how to spend my evening. A cold beer sat, just opened, on the arm of the chair. The beer was Abbott’s Lager. Why do I remember that? Because they had just changed the can design from its traditional white to yellow and I didn’t like it. Why change a beer can design? You can't drink the design. The things you remember. I gazed out the small high window of the tiny lounge room towards the south-west at an angry sky. The day had been hot, well into the forties,...

And so, back to Richmond again after a break of almost three years. William was not a year old then but it feels like yesterday. This morning I got off the train at East Richmond and crossed under the tracks via a dirty, graffitied subway to a narrow street of tiny, terraced Victorian cottages. Once, factory workers lived in them but now they have paper blinds in the windows, yuccas in the front gardens and silver BMWs out the front. Down the street, the houses give way to small industry. A growling roar came out of an auto repair shop where an engine was being wound up on a test bed. Farther along, a circular saw in a cabinetmaker’s warehouse screamed as it bit wood. Across the road a refrigerated van reversed, beeping, into a seafood wholesaler's. Towering over all of this like a fortress is the old Bryant and May match works. Factories like this once spewed smoke day and night over the suburb, known then by some as Struggletown. There was haze over Richmond again today as I wal...

Everyone in the whole world has seen that koala picture so it was probably unnecessary to post a link to it yesterday. What everyone might not have seen was the CFA officer's report of how the koala not only drank three entire bottles of water as he held them to its mouth - they usually drink very little at all - but it also reached out with its front paw and grasped the CFA officer by the hand. The koala took the officer's hand. * More animal stories: A woman was being winched by a police helicopter to safety from the flames. She was holding her dog. She dropped the dog. She then jumped to the ground from the moving helicopter winch to retrieve her dog. A police ground patrol picked her up in a police car and the helicopter radioed the car to safety. A horse followed a man into a dam to escape the flames. Both survived. "He follows me everywhere," said the man, straightfaced. Tragic: an aged couple's car was found packed and ready to go with the keys in the igni...

In one of the quickest decisions it has ever made, the State government has announced a royal commission into the fires; ahead of strident calls that were very obviously coming. The government will not want to look like it is dragging its heels. It will be looking for answers. Some it may not like. * Things are different now. There are vastly more people in what is virtual suburbia in the bush. Kinglake is almost an outer suburb; 3000 people living in the foothills of the Great Dividing Range, already dry and subject to roaring north-westerlies that sweep the continent. It was vulnerable. And eucalypts don't burn slowly; they explode. As do gas bottles. It's like having grenades lining your driveway and a bomb in your house. * You need fire breaks and wide road verges. I've driven through parts of New South Wales where road verges are cleared to a length equivalent to or greater than the height of the roadside trees. Those trees that fell on roads on Saturday night and Sund...