What I Cooked Last Night

Leeks are the world's most under-rated vegetable, except by those in the know, and the Welsh. They can even play a starring role in pasta dishes. While many people think of pasta sauces as either tomato- or cream-based, or rough equivalents, this recipe contains neither, but is as unctuous as the cream versions, and packs as much flavour as the acid-edged tomato ones. Rigatoni with leek, mushroom and gorgonzola. Slice one large leek finely into very thin rings. Rinse to eliminate grit. Slice half a red capsicum into fine dice. Slice six button mushrooms. Place leek, capsicum and mushrooms into a pan and cook slowly with olive oil and a little butter until the leek has 'melted' but not caramelised. The capsicum and mushrooms will look after themselves, the latter shedding a little fluid to keep the whole thing moist. Meanwhile, cook your pasta. For this, I used rigatoni. Drain pasta and fold through the leek 'sauce'. Top with chopped parsley. Perfect as i...

And then, by chance, I was back in the college shown in the previous post, one cold sunny morning in early September. The recently deceased spouse of an older relative had specified that his wake be held on sacred ground. And so, there we were – three cousins, amongst a large crowd of friends and relations – gazing through the panoramic window of the new sports pavilion overlooking the main football oval. At the bottom of a steep hill, a natural valley carved out by Steele’s Creek, the oval is hemmed in by dramatic terracing that rises away at just the right angle to make it a perfect, natural amphitheatre. It’s the only original part of the entire complex. Human architects could not improve it. We watched as a tractor made manoeuvres in the middle of the ground. I think it was preparing the wicket for the cricket season. Beyond the oval, way up on the hill, a Ryan’s bus roared up the Buckley Street ascent towards Essendon Station, just like they did forty years ago when we stared, bor...

St Bernard's College celebrated sixty years in West Essendon last Friday. The college started in 1939 on a postage stamp sized block of land in Moonee Ponds, and the story of how the land in West Essendon was purchased is legendary, with an enterprising Br Murphy intercepting an estate agent with a cheque late one night to stave off the signing of an early morning developer deal. The proposed streets, never to be built, had already been named and printed in that year's Melways street directory, in a pre-emptive strike by the developer. ( See my book Murphy's Lore and Other Stories: A History of St Bernard's College as Told by Those Who Were There .) The sixtieth anniversary was shadowed by the death of 2008 graduate Christopher Lane, who was murdered in Oklahoma, USA last week. R.I.P. * Photo: looking to the west, the original building on the West Essendon hill; not a house to be seen, and a faint row of trees on top of the hill where Milleara Road runs today. I...

Cook pasta - spaghetti is ideal for this olio e aglio -style recipe. Toss spaghetti in a little olive oil. Cut up a dozen anchovies into small pieces. Cut a fresh chilli into very small rings. Toss anchovies and chilli through the spaghetti. This simple dish packs an amazing flavour punch. It's been on high rotation here for years. * I saw a man gazing up into the tree. It was him: the council arborist. "It will have to come down," he said, continuing to gaze at the tree. "But not because of the mistletoe," he went on, confirming the theory, "But because prunus is prone to borers which weaken the forks, and it's too close to the wires anyway." We'll have a new prunus in a couple of weeks. I have a particular fondness for prunus: my mother's street used to be lined with mature trees, and in August they would put on a show. When visiting at night I would turn into the street at the bottom of the hill, flick the headlights onto hig...

Investigation via Google proved fruitless. So I called the council, because who would know more about trees planted on council land than the local government arborist? I held on for a long time, because it was the week the rates notices went out; and half of Moreland was on the phone to council, waiting in silent rage to vent their anger at the huge annual increase in rates. Finally I got through and I said I wanted to talk to the arborist; and the receptionist said which arborist, because they had several; and I said any arborist would do, and then she asked me to describe the growth before she put me through, adding that I sounded like an arborist myself; and I said I was as far from an arborist as a maltster is from an automatic transmission mechanic. That was the end of the conversation, and she put me through. I got the arborist's voicemail. He hasn't called back yet. I suppose they don't hang around the office too much, especially in this weather. There was a gumt...

Tuna pasta usually means tuna from a can - either cooked with a napoli sauce and sludged over spaghetti; or the non-tomato version in which peas nestle in the burrows of pasta shells blanketed with melting cheese. Both are delicious; but I often make another version using fresh tuna. Pasta nicoise. This needs a chunky pasta such as the common rigatoni; I prefer tortiglioni, a similar cylindrical ridged pasta. Marinate a piece of fresh tuna in lemon juice, chopped garlic, salt and pepper for a short time. Cook pasta. Meanwhile, sear the tuna in a little olive oil and white wine. When just done, cut into fat cubes. Trim a dozen green beans, chop into thirds and steam until just done. Do the same with some asparagus spears. Chop two or three very good vine-ripened tomatoes. If very good tomatoes are not available, use semi-dried ones. The tomatoes can be warmed through or left cold, the latter particularly good for a refreshing spring version of the dish. When pasta is don...

OK, so let's investigate. First, a walk down the street. Oh, no! Next door's nature-strip prunus has the same odd outgrowth; but in two or three places. Are we descending into a strange world of Edward Lear-like Bong trees where the leaves of one grow on another completely different type? Evergreen leaves on a deciduous tree? Or is there something more sinister at work? I never read much science fiction but I did read all of John Wyndham. Now let's climb. The parasite appears to have germinated in forks of the tree. These very old prunus are subject to attack by borers of some kind, which leave small deposits that take on a muddy consistency after rain. This mud lodges in the forks. Let's presume it provides a fertile medium for germination. Closer inspection reveals tendrils encircling the bough below the infestation. Hybrid roots? Perhaps. My correspondent, Melbourne Girl, suggested Mistletoe of some kind. But does mistletoe have exterior roots or invade its hos...

Why do I see, way up at the top of the very old and very large deciduous plum tree on the nature strip at the front of our house, a bough which appears to be growing evergreen eucalyptus leaves?

Of course, in the last year of school, we had had an unofficial competition to judge the most miserable book on the curriculum. That year the education bureaucrats, in a final post-modern lurch towards literary desolation, thought it would be a good idea to make English Literature students plumb the depths of human misery on the written page. One prescribed book after another excavated the quarry of human melancholy. The buzzword of the time was 'alienation', a word as common then as today's 'diversity' or 'sustainability'. We took to the task with a morbid sense of purpose. Across the year, I moved through the catalogue of misery slowly, like reading tombstones in a cold empty cemetery. Long Day's Journey Into Night was a day in the life of a dysfunctional, drugged, drunken family who verbally abuse each other as the light dies and the fog rolls in. The End. Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill Desolation score : 2.5 stars. Sum...

Some books just disappear. Then they resurface, years later. I found A Man About a Dog , by Alec Coppel, in the back of a dim, dark secondhand shop (which oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, reminded me of the shop in The Painted Mirror episode of iconic 1970s horror series 'Night Gallery'). Published in London in 1947, the slim volume was in brand new condition and had probably sat untouched on a shelf for sixty years until its owner died. The story: Clive, a psychiatrist, is married to Storm, who has a lover, Bill. Storm also has a Scottish terrier, Montgomery: 'Montgomery was quite a lad. Jet black, relieved only by that flash of scarlet tongue, as worn by all the best Scotties, slightly protruding through the teeth.' Clive catches Storm and Bill in the act. Storm storms off, and Clive takes Bill at gunpoint to a place whose location is not revealed to the reader, or to Bill for that matter. Here, Clive restrains Bill via an ankle chain for some months, until spec...

A bookseller discusses reading therapy in last week's Weekly Review : Every day in our bookshop we meet customers keen to 'disappear into a story' but who are struggling to find, or regain, their literary mojo. Some ... suffer a reading disorder. ... We meet customers with health issues; their chemotherapy, or post-op recovery, drug treatments, or sheer exhaustion, have affected their attention spans. 'I just want an easy read' is a common request from the unwell, the infirm, the emotionally drained, the weary. The writer's 'remedial' reading list includes J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye , Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird , Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carré and Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach . Uplifting or wrist-slashing? Is Catcher in the Rye more likely to reignite one's literary passion, or kill it stone dead? Some of those books are icons of a particular kind of mid-twentieth century literary mindset. It must be d...

Two teaspoons of salt? someone exclaimed (re yesterday's recipe). It’s not that much, I replied. Indian main courses are meant to be small serves filled out by much more rice or bread and vegetables. And in any case, these recipes are upfront about their ingredients, instead of sneaking them in progressively like some others. Take a British-style beef stew, for example; in which the beef is shaken in seasoned flour before being browned. How much salt goes into the flour? More than a shake. Then stock is added to the stew. How much salt in the stock? Who knows. The rest of the seasoned flour usually thickens the stew. If it is served with potatoes, these may be cooked in salted water, mashed with more and then salted further at the table, as are any side vegetables. The whole thing may then get a downpour of Worcestershire, HP, tomato sauce or similar. Thoroughly delicious: and by that stage, quite salty. The curry, on the other hand, is garnished with yogurt and herbs. In o...

It used to be a department store, with six floors, linked by an escalator, with ceilings and interior walls and oil heating; and that was a long time ago, because buildings don’t have oil heating any more. Then the department store closed and architects turned the building into a warehouse ‘shell’, and ripped out the top ceiling revealing skylights way above, and took away the concealing walls and heating pipes, and painted the stone cold walls behind them white; and, finally, cut a giant longitudinal floor-to-ceiling hole - almost the length of the building – through the floors on five levels, and put a steel stairway in the hole, with wire rope barriers winding around each level, so you didn’t go over the edge and fall to the ground. It looked like H division at Pentridge. You could stand at the bottom and monitor the inmates behind the wire around the perimeter at every level. Then the building was leased to a company whose workers sat at computer terminals all day, and froze. ...

Alright, straitened times. So I had to sell the blue whale . (Warning: don't take heavy-handed irony in that story literally, I'm prone to exaggeration.) Before buying it, the new owner, a retired car fancier, walked around it about a hundred and fifty times, which must be a world record. I thought he was going to turn into melted butter. But he didn’t, and bought the car, and drove away in a fairly straight line. I know he will enjoy owning it because he told me the car would be joining, in his garage, an old Mitsubishi Magna and a 1970s Fiat 130. The latter model's engine was reputed to have come from the Ferrari drawing board. More likely, someone at Ferrari sent the Fiat designer a black pen to sketch it with. Fiat 130s are not seen on the roads any more as they cost a fortune to run, and then turn to rust. So in terms of initial and future outlay, buying my 760GLE would have felt like popping down to the shops for a litre of milk. The 940 remains. It has recent...