What I Cooked Last Night

And here we are in the depths of winter - and the coldest snap for fourteen years - and immersing ourselves in stews and soups; and toasted sandwiches the size of doorstops, with cheese melting out onto the plate; and porridge with honey in the morning and raisin toast with honey at night; and red wine and black beer and mashed potato and well-roasted pumpkin and caramelised onions cooked in ghee piled up on mountains of rice and red lentil cooked with cardamom and nutmeg and cinnamon and black pepper. All well and good. But not if you can't taste it. I had a slight winter chill last week and thought nothing of it. On Saturday morning I got out and set myself the task of removing a section of invading agapanthus. I took a splitter out of the shed. It was like digging up a rainforest. The further you go in, the more there is. I turned the radio on and listened to Off the Record and that kept me going. They played more of The Dingoes' new release and a bunch of other great mus...

It was the nicest cup of tea I'd ever drunk. Perhaps it was where I was, or who had made it. I was standing in the enormous reception room of an old Anglican rectory at three o’clock on a cold Thursday afternoon. Gas heaters flickered high up on the walls. It would have been a very cold room when not in use, which seemed to be most of the time. Several large trestle tables, laden with food, ran almost the length of the room to the western wall, where a large stained glass window with a dove and a cross in it stretched up about twenty feet. Behind tables, ladies were wielding giant teapots and the tea was flowing, like the Diamantina in flood, into a regiment of cups and saucers all lined up in perfect formation. There must have been forty people in the room, queuing for tea and eyeing off the spread, which consisted of rolled-up asparagus sandwiches, tiny pastries, scones topped with jam and cream, strawberry and lemon lamingtons, butterfly cakes, rum balls and more of the kinds o...

It was the coldest Saturday morning I can remember. I walked out to get the paper and it felt like Sir Ernest Shackleton’s third expedition. I must buy a scarf and a hat. The sun came out mid-morning but made no difference to the temperature, and then it disappeared again, probably to sulk behind a cloud. It stayed cold all day. We went out for lunch, to a warm place with hot food. The warm place with hot food had brown brick walls inside, and we walked through to the back and past the kitchen and under a brown brick archway and sat at a dark-stained timber table in a dining nook far from the wind and the rain. Pictures on the walls showed a house by a sunny lake in Umbria, and cottages of many colours cascading down to a small bay of electric blue water. Either would be nice right now. * Writers are ambivalent about Lygon Street. The first line of Michael Harden’s Lygon St. - subtitled Stories and Recipes from Melbourne’s Melting Pot - reads ‘ Lygon Street is one of Australia’...

Everyone hates garlic bread. Waiters hate it because they have to 'sell' it - 'Garlic bread, guys?' (And don't call me 'guys'.) Customers hate it because they dislike having to refuse it when waiters sell it - or its close cousin, 'herb' bread. Chefs hate it because someone has to prepare it and it sure as hell isn't going to be him. Or her. No-one likes garlic bread. But I do. Because I make it at home. I never order it in cafes. Never have. Cafe garlic bread spoils your appetite. (There is a third kind of garlic bread: supermarket garlic bread. This 'product' is ideal for taking on a picnic to Coburg Lake: you feed it to the ducks while you eat proper food.) Home-made garlic bread is entirely different. For one thing, it can be just about the entire meal when accompanied with some very good red wine and maybe some cheese. You don't need to cook anything else. Gourmet supper: sourdough garlic bread. I chopped six cloves of ...

It was just after 8 a.m. on a very cold, grey Sunday morning. I was standing in front of a large grill in a tent outside the Bunnings Hardware store. Four of us were in the tent to raise funds for the kindergarten by cooking and selling sausages in bread. One to prepare, one to cook, one to sell and one to take the money. I cooked. I had the easy job. Despite the day, the time and the weather, vehicles - many of which were utes - were pulling into the vast carpark in front of Bunnings. Must be a lot of renovating going on, I thought as I turned sausages. We did shifts. In three hours I cooked 793 sausages. I knew it was 793 because we went through seven short of eight 100-packs of serviettes. I also cooked six buckets of onions. There must have been a hundred onions to a bucket. Onions are important. What really gets people is the onions. The smoke from the sausages cooking on the grill is one thing, but the aroma of cooking onions is a showstopper. People are busy these days. Th...

Nicholson Street is a twentieth century shipwreck of architecture. It is a magnificent mess. It is a proud dowager wearing a faded dress and cobwebs. It is a jumble of Victorian shopfronts and Edwardian houses and 1950s grease monkey workshops and accountants’ offices and suburban law firms and Thai cafes and factories making God knows what. Nicholson Street is tattoo parlours and ugly video stores and bicycle shops and newspaper publishers and pasta manufacturers and student houses with Tibetan flags across their front doors, bikes on their front porches and naked bulbs glowing in uncovered windows. And trams run through it. * I was on foot, heading south on the west side, the North Carlton side. It was dusk, almost six o’clock, and bleak. A tram trailing phosphorescent dust flew north, loaded to the gunwales with scarved and wired commuters bound for the home fires of East Brunswick, and red wine, and Mozart. I walked past Bande a Part, a pizza place for Franco-cinephiles where...

Of course, these days we eat leftovers. You have to when you have children, otherwise you’d be throwing out enough food to feed an army. I find it difficult to throw out food, another reason I could never be a chef. In my waiting days I was always astounded at the way people paid a fortune for food and then left half of it on the plate. A thirty dollar steak becomes a sixty dollar one (on paper) if you eat only half because it was too well-done for your liking. Why not stay home and cook it yourself – to your liking – and toss screwed-up fifty dollar bills into the fireplace afterwards instead? Because they’re plastic these days, I hear you say; and you can’t toss them because they float and flip in the air and land well short of the hearth and you’re right. It was a shame when paper money was phased out, because you could no longer liken yachting to standing under the shower tearing up hundred dollar bills. A waste of a good metaphor. We started this paragraph eating leftovers and end...

World bantamweight boxing champion Lionel Rose photographed by my father at the 1971 combined Mercy Sports, Arden Street oval, 1971, at which two of my sisters were competing. Rose is pictured with Mother Superior who is holding a sports program wrapped around an aluminium baton. Was she contemplating running an anchor leg of the 4 x 100? A well-dressed boxer engaging in polite conversation with nuns at a catholic schoolgirls' sportsday? Yes, it was a long time ago. These days the boxers wear the hoods. * Earlier photographs in this series here and here .

It was half past nine on a late autumn morning that had a golden haze in the air. I drove up out of the valley and into the main street that ran along the top of a ridge. Out of town, the ridge turned north and I was looking at dark blue shadowy hills in the distance. The ridge drops away on each side here. Down below you can see well-balanced cattle grazing on the steep green hills. Friesians. I drank their milk on my cereal this morning. Thanks, cows. Most of Victoria’s milk comes out of these hills. Farther along, the spine of the hill dropped into a chasm. You couldn’t see into it because it was covered in a white sheet that was cloud, and the road was so steep it felt like we were descending in a plane. Suddenly we were in the cloud, and all you could see was white mist flying past at a hundred miles an hour, or so it seemed. Want to eat cloud, boys? I called over my shoulder. I pressed the button and the window rolled down and the blast that came in the car was cold and clean...

Next month the days start to get longer again , I mused as I threw half a cup of flour (too much) into a tear-off plastic bag containing two large veal shanks (whole ones). I added a teaspoon of salt (about right) and the same of pepper, twisted the bag and shook it violently to coat the shanks in the seasoned flour. Too violently. The bag broke at its sealed end. At least I didn't drop the shanks. Our winters are not very cold so I shouldn't complain, of course. But as we head towards June and the house shades almost the half of the back garden, I look forward to seeing the shade recede again. A haze of seasoned flour settled serenely around the kitchen as I warmed some oil in a heavy pan and seared the shanks, rolling them around like logs and then standing them on their fat ends for a last sizzle on the cross cut. Then I laid them down and added to the pan a finely chopped onion, a diced carrot, a diced zucchini and two scored garlic cloves. I shook the pan and lidded it...

My mother-in-law was here for dinner. She had read the boys about a hundred books, and they were in bed if not asleep, and I made her a gin and tonic with a slice of lemon from the tree. I roasted a red pepper. This was going to be good. It ought to be at $10 a kilogram. Vegetable prices are snaking upwards again, along with water, mortgage rates, council rates, fuel, kindergarten fees, electricity and gas, the latter two receiving a further upward boost thanks to Kevin Rudd’s mining tax that he stole from the thesis of two American academics. All those actors’ bright ideas at the 2008 thinkfest and he steals one from two academics in America. The odds are shortening about Kevin Rudd being jettisoned before the election, and we have a Prime Minister named Julia. I peeled the pepper and set it aside, and put a finely chopped onion and a scored clove of garlic into a large warm pan in which a knob of butter was curling around as it melted, like a daydreaming figure skater. I let the ...

Shopping malls are like airports. Thousands of people pass through them, they're all the same inside, you have to park miles away and they never have good coffee. In fact, shopping malls are arguably worse than airports because when you leave, you go home again instead of somewhere different. On the other hand, no strip – or on-street – shopping centre is ever the same as any other, they attract smaller crowds, you don’t have to park in another suburb or get mugged in the car park, and you are more likely to find good coffee. This series will take you down some of my favourite Melbourne shopping strips. Your list might be different. I haven’t visited them all. * Puckle Street, Moonee Ponds Puckle Street makes this list for one reason: I virtually grew up in it. My mother and father shopped there every Saturday morning of my childhood and I went with them along with any other willing siblings, until we got older and rebelled. I didn’t return until I was sixteen when I got ...

Building the Education Revolution : first, spend billions on libraries, then throw out the books: ENGLISH teachers have questioned the value of a stand-alone literature course in the national curriculum for years 11 and 12 in an "increasingly media-driven and digital society". They could give up on literature and teach jargon instead. They are very good at it: "Key considerations will focus on whether, in an increasingly media-driven and digital society, a stand-alone literature course is the most appropriate focus for the final two years of formal school study and indeed whether the suite of courses proposed is sufficiently forward looking," the association says. "Sufficiently forward looking" ? With language like that, they shouldn't even be in the classroom. ETANSW executive officer Eva Gold said the English courses "tend to privilege print medium" over digital and multi-media texts. Never let a 14-line sonnet get in the way of a 14...

This is the one thousand and first item posted to this weblog. I would never have known, except that blogger tells you how many posts you've made at the top of the edit page. A thousand dinners were always bound to become a little repetitive; hence regular digressions into observation and outright opinionism. Of course, this blogging thing is just a lazy way to keep a diary. My paper diaries date to 1970. I kept them. They're in a box somewhere, a mixed assortment of Landseer, Folio, Collins, Vane and other types including the old National Bank of Australia notebooks issued to schools in the 1970s. I always wanted to commit events and thoughts to paper. I don't know why. The fear that I might forget? Can't be that. I have a memory like an elephant's. Ironically, I detested writing and hated writing essays at school. Now I enjoy it. But it helps that somewhere, someone might be reading this. So thank you to everyone who visits this weblog. And now for the second...