What I Cooked Last Night

St Kilda Road was once home to Melbourne's advertising industry. Some of the agency dinosaurs, such as McCanns, remain there, like fossils in a rock. As well as being Melbourne's most beautiful boulevard, St Kilda Road also boasts the slowest trams, monstrous metal boxes that clatter slowly down the middle of the road powered by steel rods reaching up to overhead electric wires. I've often wondered why tramloads of passengers don't get electrocuted every time it rains. In the early 1990s, I was working for one of the dinosaur agencies. One day the agency had a visitor, a US agency boss from New York by the name of Stanley. Stanley was on the acquisition trail. He wanted to buy the agency. If only he knew. But that's another story. Stanley had been scheduled to visit three agencies in one morning, and he arrived at my agency at nine a.m., when our MD led him on a tour of the place. A few account executives were in their offices, beavering away at their core fun...

Boil a peeled and chopped sweet potato until soft. Mash it, and place it in a mound on a bread board to cool. Make a crater in the top of the mound and crack an egg into it. Work in half a cup of flour, a tablespoon of polenta and a finely diced clove of garlic. Press and knead the mixture lightly, adding more flour if necessary until it holds together. Roll the mixture into cylinders, and slice the cylinders into half inch-thick discs. Place these on a floured board until ready to cook. Drop the discs into salted, oiled boiling water. Once they rise to the top let them bubble about for thirty seconds then quickly lift out with a slotted spoon. Drain thoroughly before placing them into serving bowls. Serve with Napoli sauce, or home made pesto and shaved parmesan.

"You can't umpire this sport and not make errors," Hayden Kennedy says. "It's an impossibility. You've just got to limit the damage." Well, we'll see on Friday. I'll be throwing the ball up for the grade sixers in their interschool match. Until now I've been running the boundary and you see plenty of infringements the central umpire doesn't, because he's usually behind the pack of twenty 10-year-olds jumping on each other. It might be easier in the middle. I ran kilometres on the boundary on Sunday morning because the northerly sweeping down Greenvale oval No. 4 kept blowing the ball into the paddock behind. Spectator attempts to boot the ball back to the middle usually got blown straight back again. Clean bump and pick-up Bounce Drop punt (Pictures are from a previous game at Keilor Park second oval complete with tractor ruts.)

Soon, the world will run out of passwords . Don't say I didn't warn you four years ago.

Tim Blair beat me to George Hamilton IV by a few hours, but I beat him to Jimmy Elledge . By three years.

People keep throwing bird's eye chilis at me. When we stayed a couple of nights at the Kingswood Motel in Tocumwal a month or so ago, the owner pointed out her herb garden near the pool and barbecue area and invited me to sample the chilis. That night I did. It was a hot evening and we ate outside as the sun went down. I grilled steaks and made a potato salad. I flattened the chilis on the grill to char them and then smeared them over the grilled steaks. Then I ate a couple whole. I saw stars. Then, back home, a neighbour gave me a whole bag of bird's eyes from her front garden. That was a few weeks ago. I've got through about half. The reason, of course, is that the chili plants are very popular right now as an ornamental planting in pots and garden beds. And they are prolific. You can't eat enough of the chilis to keep up. You have to give them away, like grapefruit. The trick with chili is to combine it with other flavours. You can't hide the heat, but yo...

From today's paper : SHOPPERS baulking at the cost of beef are scrambling for eggs and stretching supplies. Customers have been confronted with depleted egg sections at some supermarkets. A notice advised eggs were in short supply "due to unexpected events in the industry". "People searching for cheaper alternative proteins are recognising the value of eggs," Egg Farmers Aus­tralia spokesman John Coward said. "A kilo of eggs is as low as $4. A kilo of popular steak is $20-$35. They can replace a beef dinner with a frittata." When it comes to "unexpected egg events", a frittata sounds a bit of a letdown compared to, for example, a 400g porterhouse, chargrilled to perfection, still pink in the middle and drowning in pepper sauce. The following is a much more robust alternative to the ubiquitous - and somewhat pretentious - frittata, if steak is off and eggs are on. Egg and bacon pie. Grease a glass or enamel pie dish and line it with a s...

I was chopping some carrots using a vegetable knife with a short non-serrated blade. The carrots were quite hard. I slid the knife across and into the third carrot. The blade of the knife snapped suddenly at the point where it is imbedded in the handle. It rebounded against the force of my hand, flicked up and around like a soccer player doing a scissor kick, and stabbed me in the forefinger before flopping onto the table. I threw the handle and the blade into the bin, after examining the break. The imbedded section was far too thin. It was the last cheap knife I will buy. Lesson: sack your cheap cutting knives before they crack up under the pressure and do you an injury. * I had been about to make a recipe I always drag out in autumn, an old favourite I learned from my mother before she gave up on all the old standbys. Oxtail stew with garlic mash. Using a quality knife, meaning a knife made just about anywhere except China, chop six celery stalks, two onions and two carrots...

In 1966, you were generally Holden or Falcon, hating the other with a passion equal to the Smith Street divide between Fitzroy and Collingwood. Every October, Bathurst fanned the tribal flames. My brother and I were Holden because Dad got a new one every year for his job. He was a travelling salesman for John Dynon & Sons restaurant and hotel supplies. I used to go with him on school holidays and saw the inside of more restaurants by the age of ten than Simon Plant and John Lethlean put together. My brother and I always looked forward to the new model and became connoisseurs of evolving automotive design, including the Volkswagen Beetle, which in the previous year had sold more cars in Australia than ever before. Volkswagens were everywhere. An uncle (not the farm uncle) bought a navy blue one and drove it like a Lotus Esprit around the Dandenong Ranges with us in it. I'd never been more frightened. But not everyone had a Holden or a Falcon, or even a Beetle. The family n...

Merle Haggard .

In a large pot, cook pasta. When almost done, place a dozen florets of broccoli and a dozen green beans into the same pot. Simmer three minutes. Add a dozen snow peas. Wait a minute, then drain the lot. Meanwhile, heat some garlic in olive oil in another pan. Add a splash of white wine, some cracked black pepper, a dozen sliced button mushrooms and an avocado sliced into segments. Cook until mushrooms are almost soft, then add half a cup of cream, or more to taste. Reduce. Arrange pasta and green vegetables in bowls, pour over mushroom, avocado and cream sauce.

Consulting firm Deloitte explains its 'diversity' policy : The approach to innovation leverages diversity and inclusion of people regardless of gender, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, faith or disability. So far so good. One of everything, like the child in the lolly shop. But consultants Deloitte should have consulted their mates over at PwC : PwC senior executive Mark Allaby stood down from the board of the Australian Christian Lobby this month because his ACL work was in conflict with the values of the corporation for which he worked. A firm of business consultants decides its values trump those of a religious organisation? Now I've heard everything. Diversity-ridden PwC rationalises the decision: "When it comes to employee participation on external boards, if a conflict arises between an employee's board role and the best interests of PwC, we would request that the employee step down from that board," a PwC spokesman said of the matter. The spokesman ...

Somewhere in this tangled web, someone asked which music albums had, to quote, 'stayed with you'. Now, I think the expression 'stayed with you' was intended to mean 'stayed in your consciousness'; in other words, your all-time favourites. But the figurative interpretation meant you could bend the list to please your peers. They can't physically look into your record cabinet. So I decided to take the expression literally. I once owned hundreds of LP records, but over the years they dwindled in number. Of the remaining, some I will never throw out; others are rubbish and I should have binned them years ago. Here are ten albums that have stayed with me: literally. 1. Running Down the Road by Arlo Guthrie. Famous for being the son of Woodie and his cult 23-minute hit 'Alice's Restaurant', Arlo Guthrie's 1969 release ticked all the boxes for post-flower-power motorcycle-riding hippies. The record belonged to my sister, and I kept it for s...

One day in 1982 I picked up a heavy table at work and my life changed. It wasn't the weight; it was the spread. The table was six feet long. I had it overhead, but it moved. I tried to move with it, but my feet held the ground and something shifted in my back. I thought someone had shot me. They used to call it a slipped disc. An uncle of mine in the 1960s had a 'slipped disc' and couldn't walk. The term was graphic: it made me think he had a lopsided 45rpm record inside his torso. I carried the virtual bullet around in my back for ten long agony-filled weeks. Doctors gave me painkillers. A chiropractor fussed delicately over my back with spindly fingers and then, without warning, folded me in two; the biggest mood swing I have ever experienced in a medical specialist, if that's what chiropractors are. Nothing worked. It was worst after sitting. If you have back trouble, throw out your chairs. The chair is to the back sufferer what the wheel was to a medieva...