What I Cooked Last Night

When I was a child, about five or six years old, I used to go into the kitchen and open the lower door in the corner cupboard. Behind this door, at floor level, were literally thousands of tins. They could have fed the family (of nine) for years, decades even. Is this an exaggeration? It didn’t seem to be at the time. There were mountains of them, all piled in without being stacked like with like. It looked like a supermarket after an earthquake. There were tins of Biddy's peas, PMU carrots, Big Sister chocolate pudding, SPC spaghetti and baked beans, Tom Piper sausages and vegetables, Keen's mustard powder, Berri tomato juice, Letona apricot juice, Bear Brand and Carnation condensed milk, Ardmona halved pears, IXL strawberry jam, Edgell mushrooms in sauce, kidney beans, tongue, ham, camp pie, tuna, sardines, salmon, cat food; and the odd packet of Kookaburra spaghetti, Mammy flour (free coin of the world in every pack) and O-So-Lite self-raising flour. They’re the ones I can...

The cost of the electricity used in this household is paid to the company that runs the Tasmanian hydro-electric generating plant. Hydro electricity generation produces no carbon dioxide, a gas referred to by the federal government as 'carbon'. Despite producing no carbon dioxide, the hydro electricity company is obliged by federal legislation to provide a 'green' energy product (branded GreenPower by the bureaucracy: "Helping Australia transition to renewable energy" ) as well as its core product, even though its core product – hydro electricity - is the 'greenest' energy available in the market. The company complies with this legislative stipulation, despite the absurdity of having to theoretically add wind and solar into hydro to 'improve' its 'green' credential. (Ironically, the hydro company also clearly shows the GreenPower cost penalty on its website, which many other energy providers do not, preferring sanctimoniously to bury th...

We took them to the Astor cinema to sit in antique fold-up chairs, see curtains opening on the wide screen and, most importantly, eat choc tops. Shock: the boys chose Golden Gaytimes instead. The movie was an old musical with no special effects and a Rodgers and Hammerstein soundtrack. Alexandra, however, had a Choc Top to herself. Before intermission, bored with the movie, she sat on a couch next to the sleeping cinema cat and did not spill a drop of ice cream. I sat on the other side of the cat and read the Sunday newspaper in the dim art deco light with the sounds of gunshots and whinnying from the auditorium and the faint rumble of trams outside.

This recipe has the heat of the equator, the tang of the tropics, and the sweetness of the islands; all of which is academic - we ate the meal on a cold autumn night in Melbourne with rain pelting on the iron roof. I evolved the recipe from an old balchao dish I used to make. The original recipe was as hot as you like; later versions toned down the chili, added spices, added coconut, added lime. Let's get started: fry two onions in ghee. Remove and retain onions. Brown one kilogram of chicken pieces in the pan. Add oil or ghee as required. Remove chicken when browned. Meanwhile, process half a cup of roasted cashews (I dry-roasted raw cashews first), half a cup of dessicated coconut, two large and very ripe and juicy vine tomatoes, two tablespoons or slightly more of malt vinegar, one black cardamom pod, one twinkle of star anise, a scatter of dried chilies, half a teaspoon each of crushed cinnamon and cumin seeds, four cloves of garlic, an inch of peeled ginger and one sma...

How much do you pay for coffee? The price of my favourite coffee rose on Monday. From $2 to $2.20. Consider that as table rental with the coffee thrown in free and it could be Melbourne's best entertainment value. The coffee is robust and vibrant in the old-fashioned Italian style. Order it strong and you'll float down Sydney Road, unlike some of the warm beige concoctions with art-directed froth you get down in Brunswick. You sit outside in the shade of the trees watching the passing Coburg parade; and it is a parade like nowhere else in Melbourne. No pretensions here. You might have to wait for a table, as many are taken up by local retired Greeks and Italians, as well as residents from the special needs accommodation nearby, who like to take their time over their coffee; and you won't get a friendlier crowd anywhere. Brunswick Street bristles with attitude by comparison. The buskers are good quality. Yesterday in the mid-morning sunshine, a young woman sang a...

We haven’t had song of the month for a while, so here are two. * His name was Jones and he was my personal favourite British pop singer of the 1960s. No, not Tom. He was my second favourite. (Have you heard Without Love at full volume lately?) The other Jones, Paul, had an amazing range and sang - both solo and for Manfred Mann - some of the best songs ever written. One was Come Tomorrow , a soul masterpiece originally recorded by Marie Knight. If the song of a song bird could replace my wrong words Then my dear it’s the song I would borrow And tonight you would hear the saddest song of the year And you’d be mine once again come tomorrow The instrumentation is initially spare, rising to an amazing crescendo built around the keyboard - watch the cut-aways on the YouTube track. Jones’ astoundingly tortured vocals are a match for the piano, revealing the futility of the song’s premise. A stunning performance. Come Tomorrow peaked at 24 on the Melbourne charts in 1965,...

One discounted 60 cent packet of seeds from Bunnings two years ago resulted in these. I kept the flower heads from the first crop and scattered the dried seeds last spring. Up came the tallest sunflowers I have ever raised, upwards of seven feet with flowers the size of dinner plates. The picture was taken a month ago. Yesterday I disposed of the dried stalks. I had to saw them. They had made great staves when green and pliable; the boys had medieval battles and then pole-vaulted around the front garden. I put half the heads in brown bags in the shed. Birds had already got to the rest and eaten the lot.

Yes, February was always the busiest month and you get fewer days to do it in. And the weather! When I was ten I read Colin Thiele's February Dragon , about as accurate a portrayal of February weather as it gets. Another early read was Ivan Southall's Ash Road published in the early 1960s, and with a darkly prophetic title given the events of 2009. And 1983 and 1967 and other years, for that matter. Do children still read Australian literature or just Andy Griffiths these days? It's all rain into March; but on the last weekend of February we sweltered at the beach. As the sun fell on the Saturday evening, Tracy walked the ti-tree lined slopes with Alexandra reclining in the stroller. They returned. She smiled. I took over. Walked down to the beach. No sleep. Onto the sand where after dinner walkers, many with dogs, were enjoying the sunset. The water was still warm, tide on its way out. Earlier in the day, I had been a couple of hundred metres offshore with the boys o...

Eye fillet with garlic butter. Slice two inches off a 250 gram stick of butter. Allow it to soften but not melt. (Not difficult in this climate: at the time of writing it was 32 degrees outside (we’ve gone from Fahrenheit to Celsius in two posts) with black clouds and storms approaching the city). Assist the softening process if necessary by cutting into smaller cubes. Chop a sprig of parsley as finely as you can including the fine stalk. One way to do this is by placing it in a glass and chopping it with scissors. This works surprisingly well. Peel four cloves of garlic and chop them as finely as possible. Combine the butter, parsley and garlic: best done with a fork, in a cup. Add salt and cracked pepper to taste. (Vary the relativities in this mixture depending on your preferred garlic Beaufort Scale.) Transfer to a piece of aluminium foil, roll up and shape into a cylinder. Refrigerate. Meanwhile peel, chop and boil four large potatoes; trim twenty green beans. If you are n...

Sunday, 19 December 1971 It was another brittle morning, one of those summer daybreaks that brings a gentle roar from the horizon like distant thunder. The last cool breeze had long gone. Eight in the morning, and I was dripping sweat onto the back seat of a 1967 Valiant that had already been laboring for two hours. People collect them these days, but then it was just a car with green vinyl seats and an AM radio and no headrests and windup windows. We were heading directly west and it felt like the home straight, if any home straight was ever 600 kilometres long. Earlier the sun, rising behind, had made a long shadow of the car on the road ahead. Now it was rampaging across the sky. Like so often before, I dozed. If you happen to doze because you are trapped in a stifling car driving across an endless lanscape, you start dreaming the heat. First I was standing too close to a campfire; then I was shovelling coal into the firebox of a 4-6-4 steam engine; then I was a steelworker in...

She says chain bookshops often failed because they were overlit, treated customers like cash cows and sold populist books that ironically catered to a small, occasional reader market. They neglected the 'real readers' who read voraciously but wanted intelligent staff and a wide choice. Paradoxical? Condescending? No. The owner seems to have a very good instinctive grasp of the business. The fact is, buying books is difficult when you have to reach your purchase across a counter stacked high with ephemera designed for the impulse purchaser. Into this category, I place books with one ‘wisdom’ quote on each spread opposite a picture of a sunset; books filled with pictures of cats; books filled with pictures of flat white buildings in Greece; books filled with pictures of cats sitting on flat white buildings in Greece; books that spin off from television shows; and books with ‘Little’ in their titles (e.g., The Little Book of Calm ). This last has sold two million copies, accord...

Souvlakis: Carlton When I was a student (because only students eat souvlakis) I was in the habit of crossing five suburbs to Twins, on the corner of Elgin and Lygon streets, for what were the best souvlakis in Melbourne. Soft, fresh pita were jammed with juicy lamb drowned in yogurt and lemon juice and served in a greaseproof-lined brown bag that collected all the lemony, garlicky juices in the bottom. Slurp. On one return trip, the exhaust manifold came away from the engine. English cars are great until they break. Navy blue 1964 Morris Minor Traveller (the wood-panelled estate) Hamburgers: Ballarat I used to drive to Ballarat for hamburgers. It was a small shop on the Melbourne side of town on the north side of Victoria Street opposite one of the old churches. The burgers must have been good, because it was a three-hour round trip. The crazy things you do in your early twenties, but it was a fun car to drive. White 1965 Ford Falcon XP Lebanese: Russell Street In the o...

Yesterday I walked into a room, and there were no elephants in there.

Friday, 17 December 1971 The day before, during the torrid drive northwards, I had wondered why someone hadn’t built a detour; a giant hypotenuse to slice a triangle off the journey. I did some back-seat mental calculations. Norseman to Kalgoorlie, 191 kilometres. Okay, build a road north-west to strike the Great Western Highway the same distance west of Kal. That’s a saving of 112 kilometres, I figured, thanks to third-form mathematics. I turned my head. What do you think, cousin? Cousin, bored - even with the music now, at this stage of the journey - was drily not sure the Kalgoorlie chamber of commerce would like passing traffic diverted 179 kilometres (mid-point of the hypotenuse) away. To hell with the chamber of commerce, I said, and we kept driving up the first leg to the right-angle vertex. After a few hours of this nonsense, we had arrived. Like far too many places in this story, mining town Kalgoorlie was surrounded by desert. Its gold rush occurred during the 1890s dep...