What I Cooked Last Night

The last thing the world needs now is another chorizo recipe. Chorizo is a cliché. Pick up any newspaper or magazine and there’s a recipe for chorizo. But there’s a reason. It’s good; the dried Spanish-style sausage is packed with chilli and garlic. It pairs well with pasta as long as all the ingredients are robust. I use rigatoni instead of the usual clichéd penne. Recipe Cook 250g rigatoni. Halfway through, place one or two chorizo sausages in the cooking water. Cook five minutes more. Drain. Combine pasta in a pot with a tablespoon of good olive oil, a drained tin of borlotti beans and half a tin of diced tomatoes. Slice chorizo, fold through pasta, place in serving bowels, add halved cherry tomatoes and a little crumbled feta. That covers most of Europe.

Wouldn't normally post a picture of a face-painted child but the quality of the artwork was outstanding in this case. He'd been to a party. Thomas turns six tomorrow. Here he is at a few days old in 2006. I can see a bit of tiger about him now, come to think of it. * I'm the king of the jungle They call me the tiger man I'm the king of the jungle They call me tiger man If you cross my path You'll take your own life in your hands (Lewis/Burns)

Late in the afternoon, we were on a beach on the southern side of the Murray River. The sky was that shocking blue you get in the inland and the day was still hot. The river was flowing north-east, which means the beach was on one of those bends that doubles back on itself, a billion-year-old fluke of nature. The water was silent and deadly. You could see the current out towards the middle; fast busy wrinkles that would have you downstream in a flash. The boys waded to a small island near the shore that was just mud with an ancient gum tree growing in it. The gum was bent and its lower limbs dragged in the flowing water and it looked like an old fisherman trying to hold a net. No wonder the aborigines saw spirits in everything; the quality of light and the depth of the shadows out here makes figures of everything. They practised going along in the softer current close to shore. I stood downstream a little and showed them how to swim towards the bank with the flow, and not against i...

Dropped down into the tea tree to the west flashed; colours sat moved along red head blue sun flashing; gold wings? gone. Thomas saw it first. Seven am on a spring morning.

It was one of those cold nights that creep up on you in early spring. I was on the train. Every passenger was wired, but they call them customers these days. "Attention all customers: the 7.40 from Frankston has been cancelled due to overhead works. Fingers tapping and flicking. Necks craned down. Eyes fixed on screens. Automatons. Earlier that day, one of my clients – a consumer goods manufacturer – had asked me for help with his Facebook page; meaning his company's Facebook page, not his own personal Facebook page. Yes! Companies have Facebook pages! The page's message board or wall or whatever the thing is called had been beset with negative comments about one of its products. Many were factually incorrect, some were abusive, and some were unpublishable in mainstream media. He wanted to design a kind of pseudo app within the page that would get complaints off the wall and into a forum so that the comments could be sorted and the genuine ones dealt with individually...

Obscure quiz question: what’s so special about the following football score? Carlton 18.6.114 Richmond 10.9.69 Answer at the end of this post. (If you’ve already picked it, you are a football tragic with an eye for detail, or a Richmond fan who never forgets.) * Richmond was Struggletown for most of the twentieth century, a hazy suburb of worker's cottages jammed in amongst factories that made glue and paint and matches. The Bryant and May matchworks and the Rosella cannery employed thousands. When there was a northerly, the smoke from the factories drifted across the river and got in the eyes of South Yarra residents. * Every year I spend four weeks – sometimes more – in Richmond, one of the world's great inner suburbs. It's work; but I like to pretend it's a holiday. I enjoy walking the narrow streets at lunchtimes, gazing at the mostly renovated worker's cottages amongst the jumble of factories, warehouses and buildings of no clear description that c...

Sweet potato has been cheap lately. I like it cubed and cooked and turned into a warm salad with torn spinach and segments of vine-ripened tomato and toasted pine nuts, all dressed with a mixture of vinegar, lemon juice, horseradish and a touch of mayonnaise. A large bowl of that makes a meal in itself, if you add a couple of freshly poached eggs and some lightly-toasted batons of Turkish bread. But here’s how I cooked it recently: Sweet potato gnocchi. Peel and chop one Beauregard sweet potato. Boil it until soft. Mash it or press it through a ricer, and place it in a mound on a bread board or marble work bench. Let it cool for ten minutes. Open a bottle of shiraz and pour a glass. Now make a crater in the top of the mound. Crack one egg and the yolk of another into the crater. Using your hands, gradually work in up to half a cup of flour, a scant tablespoonful of polenta and a finely diced clove of garlic. Press and knead the mixture lightly, adding more flour until it hol...

It's been a big week. I minded a two-year-old for two days, launched a book, had lunch with my mother, took a five-year-old for blood tests (all clear), wrote a million stupid words for clients, read a primary school Principal's weekly bulletin in which he lambasted parents of children making their First Communion for noisily using iPhones and other devices in the church during the ceremony, pulled out a now-shaded climbing rose and planted lawn in its place, made two days' worth of gravy beef and mushroom casserole, and read Squadron Airborne by Elleston Trevor. I'm going home to a big marbled steak, cooked rare on a red-hot cast iron pan, with a slew of fragrant garlic butter on top; and served with whipped potatoes and silver beet from the garden cooked with garlic and cracked pepper and pureed with a touch of cream. I would also pull the cork out of a bottle of Mt Alexander shiraz, but these days they come with a screwcap.

Not only has word verification outlived its usefulness; it is also now counterproductive, having become completely unreadable, thereby preventing humans - let alone robots - from posting comments. So I've switched it off. In any case, the verification function is a relic from the days when weblogs were cutting edge social media and targetted by spammers. Now we're as old hat as sending birthday cards and thank-you notes through the mail. Presumably robots are no longer interested, and are trying to ingratiate themselves with the Twitter crowd. We'll see. Meantime, commenting is easy again.

Last time I was at Florentino’s Cellar Bar, which was on a cold, wet Friday night years ago (the review is somewhere in this weblog), I had a robust dish of pasta tossed through with black pudding and pine nuts. It was very good. But you have to like black pudding. (The Cellar Bar is a cafe-society style dining room where there is no artifice, Italian cafe traditions endure, the food is robust, and old-fashioned gingham lives on .) I’ve replicated that dish, with variations, many times since. Here's its latest incarnation. Rigatoni with black pudding, broad beans and roasted tomatoes. Drizzle some olive oil and shake some cracked pepper and salt over two dozen cherry tomatoes - or other miniature variety - and roast them until they collapse. Slice black pudding into rounds about the size of a ten cent piece (use smooth black pudding rather than the Scottish type which is flecked with oats) and fry on both sides until slightly crisp. Pod and peel a bowlful of broad beans...

I was going to post some of the children's art, however illustrator and retired RAAF Squadron Leader Hugh Dolan has beaten me to it. Here's William's illustration of a First World War dogfight; and here's Thomas' picture of a Sopwith Camel.

The sun crept across the pale painted wall of the shed in the back garden at 7am for the first time since autumn. It couldn’t reach the wall that early during winter, being lower in the sky. Now we get an extra burst of reflected light in the south-facing kitchen. The warmth is welcome. Even the creatures think so. Last night I saw the season’s first huntsman, crawling along the side fence. It’s less than a fortnight ago that I passed, while walking home through Yarra Park on a bitterly cold Melbourne night, someone walking one of those snow dogs that has those piercing pale blue irises. Nothing unusual about that? The dog was wearing a coat. Spring warmth comes in on the arms of a vicious spring wind. Everything is covered in blossom. It would have been nice to see it sit on the trees a bit longer. Seems to have lasted only days. And the work begins. I pulled out ten metres of rocket and wondered whether we’ll ever plant it again. Put it in pesto; make salad; that’s it. Then it ...

Some spelling errors, typos, literals – call them what you like – mess with your mind. I once ordered 'parched eggs' in a cafe knowing full well what they were. The other day I saw a sign in a deli that said: 'mindless bacon, $15.99 a kilo'. M is nowhere near R on a keyboard so who knows how that one occurred? I was buying bacon to make an old recipe that the children have come to adopt as one of their favourites. One out of three of the children on a moderate day - and two out of three one a finicky day - will not eat eggs; while the third – who does eat eggs – will only eat the yolk. Yet all three will slurp up spaghetti carbonara. Hide the eggs in something else! (Perhaps we also should bring back the 1960s egg flip: to a litre of creamy milk in a blender, add two tablespoons of sugar, two eggs, and a dash of vanilla essence. Blend. Pour the delicious bubbling unctuous fluid into tall glasses and top with nutmeg. Retro flavour explosion! I want one now. They w...

Two years. A thousand emails. Dozens of letters. Days hunched over a keyboard, putting together a book about a school. Editing submissions – some illegible, some unintelligible, some beautiful diamonds – from past students and teachers; tapping out every letter, removing endless capitalisation of Supposedly Important Words, putting paragraph breaks in pages of never-ending text. Going through a million arch folders in a crypt-like archive room watched in eerie silence by a mute ex-department store dummy standing inside a dusty glass display cabinet, dressed in a 1940s school uniform and topped with a straw sun hat to shade the dim half-light of a solitary naked bulb. The uniformed dummy is supposed to awaken warm nostalgia in visitors; but it manages only to look like a cadaver, or a mannequin in a police missing persons investigation. Shiver. Distant laughter and the thump of ball games at a distance, and then a bell leading to a mid-afternoon silence broken by the rattly keyboard, ...