What I Cooked Last Night

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, purple carrots grew wild in peace. Then ancient peoples, possibly the Hittites or the Armenians or the Persians, or possibly someone else, cultivated them for their seeds and foliage, completely ignoring the root, or else feeding them to swine. Centuries flashed by. One day the Dutch, who loved travelling because their homeland was always flooding and there was always the chance of finding another tulip, discovered purple carrots in Iran, and took them home. They gave one to the man who had hybridised tulips and asked him what were the chances of another bubble. Developments after that were sketchy, but later, in a fit of nationalism, he turned them orange in honour of the Dutch Royal house. Thenceforth all carrots were orange, except for the few desert carrots who remained true to their roots, blissfully unaware of their kidnapped orange cousins. * Purple carrots are back. I tried them last week. They come from Tasmania, where the grower c...

As a fair weather supporter, I read the sports pages when my team is winning. And so I turned to Mike Sheahan’s column in today’s Herald Sun. In warning Essendon supporters about getting ahead of themselves, Mr Sheahan pointed out an extraordinary coincidence. He noted the last two new Essendon coaches have recorded large wins in their first games, each of exactly 55 points. Nine goals, one behind. Not a common margin. Mr Sheahan could have delved a little further. On 3 April 1972 (my fifteenth birthday), I attended the Western Oval with my nineteen-year-old brother to watch the opening round of the season. That summer, Des Tuddenham had been controversially appointed Essendon coach after several turbulent years at Collingwood during which he and some other players once notoriously went on strike. Essendon defeated Footscray that day in 1972. Tuddenham helped himself to a margin of exactly one goal more than Hird’s or Knights’ 55 points margins. Literally. Tuddenham was playing ...

It was a 'working' weekend. It was just me and the boys. I painted the lounge room floor of the beach house in the quiet morning while the boys, outside, threw toys on the roof. It was the wind , they said. Nothing to do with us . I got the ladder and a broom out three times. The floorboards are varnished clear and I redo them every few years. The painting part is easy; it’s the moving furniture. There’s always too much. I stopped at midday and cooked lunch for the boys. Sea air and flinging toys gives you an appetite. Pasta shells with canned tuna and peas and sprinkled parmesan, pancakes with maple syrup, glasses of milk. After lunch I moved some furniture back over dried sections of varnish and painted some more, and the boys played on the balcony and shot model cars off the edge and climbed down the stairs and retrieved them. Tiring of that (and speaking of retrieving) Thomas let next door’s dog, an overweight, amiable Golden Retriever in through the gate in the fence. Th...

Friday night. Late. The wreckage of another week lay in my wake, bobbing about randomly before disappearing into some dark crevice of memory. The morning had brought some good news, via email naturally, releasing me from a hideous one month contract of writing impossible bureaucratese for a client whose acquaintance with the English language ended, or began, I’m not sure which, with ‘digital contact points’, which they shorten to DCP, because everyone knows what they are, of course. They have acronyms in every paragraph and they capitalise words to give them more importance. Goodbye. Then the telephone had rung. Yes, some people still ring you up. The person ringing me up was an old work acquaintance of the nice kind, wanting to know if I was free on Monday for a month. That was like losing the wicked witch and gaining Snow White. Later, finishing a morning’s business in the city, I had ridden the escalator down into Melbourne Central Station under a backlit sign advertising Earth...

The late summer air was still simmering. It was after seven. I put the charcoal in a pile in the grate and put a match to it in three places and left it to consume itself and turn white hot. That would take forty minutes and in those forty minutes I would make a salad of roasted pumpkin cubes, avocado, rocket, toasted macadamias, chick peas and shards of feta cheese dressed with olive oil and lemon juice; set the outside table; walk inside several times and out again forgetting what I had gone in for; and pour a large balloon glass full of red wine that was almost black and seductive with the fragrance of something you read about in wine columns. Blackberries? American oak? French barriques? I don’t know, but it was nice. Forty-five minutes later I placed the first item on the grill: a piece of ling swimming in a marinade of soy, ginger, a clove of garlic and a chopped spring onion and wrapped in foil. We sat and watched the show. It started on time as usual. Two legs stepped out o...

The sun is warm but it comes later in the morning and goes earlier at night. Time moves on. The seasons pass. Children grow. The baby cut a tooth yesterday. William is a schoolboy. Thomas misses him. They were inseparable. Have I ever taken a photo of one without the other half in shot? Thomas learned to swim this summer, had the confidence to climb the diving board at Coburg, dove off in a kind of flat fall, swam to the other side, climbed out. He wore yellow swimmers and yellow flippers and looked like a fat duck. William, not confident enough to dive, called instructions from the side. Some curious children gathered to watch this small muscly boy diving. ‘Who taught you to dive?’ they called. ‘Him,’ lied Thomas, pointing to William; and stood on the end of the board, rocking gently up and down, toes on the edge, arms outstretched, waiting. ‘Tell me when, Winnie,’ he called. The pet name remains from when he could not pronounce the name at twelve months. William paused, then shoute...

We don't go around smashing plates, but occasionally one gets lost in action, especially the set that came from Italy via David Jones under the label of Richard Ginori Ironstone. Ironstone? You only had to look at them and they'd chip. The Alfa Romeo of plates: you needed two in case one packed it in halfway through dinner. The Denby ones (English) weren't much better. I have one left. So I get to go crockery shopping. Crockery shopping is fun. I don't buy new any more; I prefer the look of a table spread with a mixed array of plates. As long as they're all of good quality, your table gains the air of a fading dynasty. Dining al fresco gets a particular lift when using stately old crockery. Apart from that, I don't like many of the modern patterns or designs, especially plates that are square. Children try to push their vegetables into the corner. On a round plate there's nowhere to hide. So off to the Restorer's Barn again. They have a separate room...

I drove down to Nicholson Street on a warm late summer evening, pulled a u-turn just past Our Lady Help of Christians church and stopped the car just south of the Barkly Street corner. We got out and left the car unlocked. No-one steals Volvos. It was parked right outside anyway. We went in. The door is still awkwardly propped ajar each evening around 5 o'clock, the decor hasn't been touched since the place opened, and the traffic noise still roars in off Nicholson Street while you wait for your order. We ordered and waited. From my place you have to pass six or seven perfectly good curry houses to get to Singh's, but it's a nostalgic journey. I first visited here in 1986, and that was the year it opened. I might have been their first customer. The curry nearly blew my head off. A friend and I used to have competitions to see who could withstand the hottest curry. A lot of cold beer was consumed in the process. William, Thomas and Alexandra's much older brother ...

Ex- The Australian reporter and now independent bookseller Corrie Perkin gets free publicity on Page 3 of last Saturday's Weekend Australian : "A true booklover loves having a conversation about books ... That may be the conversation they have with the bookseller or with other booklovers in the bookshop. ... You can't have those conversations with Amazon, you can't have those conversations most of the time in a shop like Borders because they don't have the staff." True, but only up to a point. It's also patronising to customers as well as to the hundreds of book-loving staff who work in the book chains. They don't all do it for the dollar. Moreover, it ignores the information available at Amazon such as reader comments and reviews, forums, rankings, reader purchases, recommendations, recently viewed lists and on it goes. I have found Amazon's service to be faultless, and I do enjoy that parcel arriving in the mail. No face-to-face? That's lik...

Childhood summers were Inverloch and Choc Wedges and Essendon baths and backyard apple fights with my cousins in the sweltering dark. Picking bucket loads of ripe fruit from the apricot trees. The wooden salad bowl of iceberg lettuce always on the kitchen table. The Carnival is Over and Strangers in the Night . The rumbling of trams from Keilor Road at 6 a.m. on hot mornings. And Puffin books. They were a kind of default Christmas gift for an age that is hard to buy for; past toys and not ready for grown-up things. So they gave me Puffins. Hundreds of them. The funny thing is, I associate them with one place: the apple tree in the backyard in a little patch of lawn behind the garage. The tree was the same one that yielded the worm-filled fruit that became the ammunition for the great apple fight of 1967 (mentioned above) that ended only when my cousin had to go home to Clayton, to us the other side of the world. I used to read my books under that tree, sitting in a timber and canv...

It sat there on the kitchen table. It must have been three feet long, but it had taken a detour two thirds in. The short end was fatter than the barrel. It looked like an oversized pirate’s pistol. It weighed 2.5 kilograms. It was a monster. We’d been trading vegetables with our neighbour. This one, a white zucchini known sometimes as Lebanese white squash, trumped the lot. I’d imagined the struggle my next door neighbour had suffered in landing it. Wrestling it from the vine. Lashing it to the wheelbarrow. Fighting off garden predators on the barrow run back down the garden path to kitchen’s safe harbour. The old man and the zucchini. It was edible. Usually at that size they are only good for show. But the constant rain and heat in the last two weeks meant it was still tender inside. We dined off it for a week. Zucchini curry, Goanese-style This curry combines spices often associated with the Goa region of India, but I don’t know if regionality matters any more. In any case, t...

7 p.m. I was sitting staring into the west facing window of a restaurant in a small rural city in the middle of Victoria. It was another shadowy place full of dark walls and dark stained timber tables and chairs. The sun low in the sky streamed into the window through the slats of a wooden Venetian and made gold stripes on my face and the walls behind me. The stripes were hot. There were two wine glasses on the table and I poured some red wine into them and we drank and I watched some dust motes swim through the sunbeams. Tracy sat on the opposite side of the table with the sun behind her. She was a silhouette and her hair was a fiery sunset. We raised our glasses. Cheers! The children were there too, but do we have to bring them into it? Children should be seen and not heard. They agreed for once. The place was called Capone’s and inside the enlarged ‘O’ in the middle of the word on the sign out the front was an illustration in an early black and white photographic style of a fat ma...

The town had that uncanny height-of-summer stillness. It was midday. You expect a curtain to move in a window or a dog to snarl as you walk down the street past the sleeping houses. It was forty degrees, a hundred-plus on that old scale they used to show on GTV-9 next to the black and white clock in between programs. Epic Theatre. Point of View. TV Ringside. Epilogue. I walked past the houses and down the hill and then there were shops that were once stables and blacksmiths and grain stores and banks for newly-dug gold. I pushed open a door and went into a cavernous old building that could have been anything. Talk about another world. It was pitch black until your eyes got used to it, and then it was just dark, with pinholes of light in the corrugated iron ceiling above ancient timber rafters. I don’t know what it was then, but now they call it the Restorer’s Barn. It creaked in the heat. In a rainstorm you wouldn’t hear yourself admiring the old wares. The pinpoints in the ceilin...

Born in June 2005. Started school last Thursday. Blue and navy over grey; black lace-up shoes. Blue hat. 'Do I look like a pilot?' he asked. He did. Flying through life.