What I Cooked Last Night

CLYDE P. ULSTER WAS A SANDY-HAIRED FAT MAN WHO HAD A RED FACE AND WORE A SUIT THAT WAS TOO BIG, BECAUSE HE THOUGHT IT WOULD MAKE HIM LOOK SMALLER. IT DIDN'T. CLYDE P. ULSTER LOOKED LIKE AN ELEPHANT IN A COLLAPSED CIRCUS TENT. MR ULSTER STARTED WORKING AT ADVERTISING AGENCY BLAKE BROWNING BURNS ONE WINTER. HE APPEARED LIKE SO MANY CONSULTANTS DO - HE TURNED UP EVERY NOW AND THEN UNANNOUNCED; AND BEFORE WE KNEW IT, HE PART OF THE PLACE, BORING US TO DEATH AT FRIDAY NIGHT DRINKS AND LAUGHING TOO LOUD AT THE MD'S JOKES. CLYDE DROVE A TWENTY-YEAR-OLD NAVY BLUE MERCEDES 400SEL WHICH WAS COVERED IN DUST AND HAD A BACK SEAT FULL OF JUNK UP TO THE WINDOW SILLS. THE JUNK INCLUDED PLASTIC-BOUND INCH-THICK PRINT-OUTS OF POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS, YELLOWING AND DOG-EARED. THAT MEANT CLYDE P. ULSTER HAD EITHER EXACTLY THE WRONG ATTITUDE ABOUT POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS, OR EXACTLY THE RIGHT ONE. I COULDN'T FIGURE OUT WHICH. THE REST OF THE JUNK INCLUDED RETAIL BUSINESS TENDER DOCUMENTS ...

Yeah, I had to read it twice as well. Some headlines do that to you. Pasta with walnuts and broccoli. Something to do with flavour or texture or both. Nuts go with members of the brassica family and if you underscore that pairing with something warm and bland and homely, like traditional home-made pasta, and bind it with a compatible fat - cream or cheese or both - you have the makings of a great dish. Hence the following: Cook the pasta. Rigatoni is my fallback when discrete components appear in the sauce, but for this I used farfalle, usually incorrectly translated as bowties for the obvious reason, but when you know it means butterflies, you will never again look upon a pack of them in a shop as an item of men's clothing. Meanwhile, cook a finely chopped onion and a clove of garlic in some olive oil in a shallow non-stick pan. Then add half a cup of white wine, the same amount of cream, and a shower of walnuts. Stir and reduce. When the pasta is almost cooked, throw ...

WAYNE, A JADED ADVERTISING AGENCY MD, IS ON A LONG DISTANCE FLIGHT WITH AGENCY ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE, TRENT, WHOSE OVER-EARNEST RAMBLINGS ABOUT THE UPCOMING BUSINESS PITCH ARE KEEPING WAYNE AWAKE DESPITE HAVING RELIEVED THE PLANE OF ITS SINGLE MALT WHISKY STOCKS. TRENT WANTS TO REVIEW THE PITCH (TO INTERNATIONAL EQUESTRIONAGE, A BETTING 'INTELLIGENCE' COMPANY) DESPITE IT BEING THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. SUDDENLY THE PLANE HITS TURBULENCE. TRENT HITS THE ROOF AND THEN BECOMES AS MAUDLIN AS A DRUNK IN A EUGENE O'NEILL PLAY. TRENT: You need a holiday Wayne. Why don't you take this weekend off? WAYNE: What's a weekend? TRENT (DOESN'T GET SARCASM): It's the days in between Friday and Monday when other people relax, have long leisurely breakfasts, go and play golf, and play with their children. WAYNE (DOWNING THE LATEST SCOTCH AND GETTING TEARY AND MOROSE): Oh. I must have one soon then. I've got children, you know. (PAUSE) I wonder what their names a...

Rated R: adult themes, strong language, threats of violence, extreme sexism, etc. etc. In other words, a perfectly normal conversation between mature adults in the pre-'You Can't Say That!' era. ON AN AEROPLANE SOMEWHERE. IT IS LATE AT NIGHT, POSSIBLY EVEN EARLY IN THE MORNING. THE BLACKNESS OUT THE WINDOW GIVES NO CLUE. WAYNE AND TRENT - OF ADVERTISING AGENCY BLAKE, BROWNING, BURNS - ARE IN ADJOINING SEATS FLYING TO A FAR DISTANT LOCATION WHERE THEY ARE TO PRESENT A NEW BUSINESS PITCH TO A MAJOR CORPORATION WHICH PRODUCES HIGHLY SECRET SOFTWARE USED BY INTERNATIONAL GAMBLING INTELLIGENCE PROVIDERS FOR THE HORSERACING INDUSTRY. WAYNE, 41, IS AGENCY MANAGING DIRECTOR AND HAS SEEN IT ALL. HE KNOWS THE TRICKS AND CAN PICK BULLSHIT AT A HUNDRED YARDS. HE HAS BEEN AROUND LONG ENOUGH TO KNOW THAT THE ENTIRE ADVERTISING INDUSTRY IS A GAME PEOPLE INDULGE THEMSELVES IN TO PREVENT BOREDOM. WAYNE IS SEMICOMATOSE AFTER SEVERAL EXTREMELY ENJOYABLE SINGLE MALTS. TRENT, 28, IS A T...

An agency I once worked with had plenty of money to spend on lunches. Well, they all did; but this one had more than most. It had a lot of government business, and when bureaucrats throw money at advertising campaigns, they don't count it first. Counting money is for the private sector. Governments don't spend their own money; they spend yours, so why stint? They can always get their hands on more. Anyway, the agency wanted to reward its clients for being loyal. The CEO decided to take its $5 million-plus clients to dinner, and give each an expensive Swiss watch. He'd written the presentation card himself, omitting to run it past the copywriter: 'We'd like to thank you for being a client by giving you this timeless watch.'

Here's what I do in mine. (Note: the AdAge article is almost ten years old; I came across it again by accident when trawling through some old writings. The advertising agency blog is no longer online - I am adapting it into a book. And yes, I still have the same sandwich and three sugars in my coffee.)

The answer is both, if you serve the following for dinner. It satisfies both soup- and pasta-lovers. Tortellini soup. First, make some vegetable stock (or use your preferred stock). In a large pot containing about 1500ml of water, bring to the boil a large chopped carrot, a large chopped onion, a stick of chopped celery, a chopped leek, some parsley sprigs, a peeled and scored garlic clove, a bay leaf, a little dried rosemary, a teaspoon of cracked pepper and half a teaspoon of salt. Once on the boil, turn down and simmer for an hour. Strain the stock, return to pot and add half a kilogram of ricotta tortellini, a cupful of finely shredded silver beet, a cup of peas and a tablespoon of preferably home-made pesto (basil, walnuts, parmesan, garlic, olive oil). Simmer another twenty minutes. Serve with shards of parmesan cheese broken from the block.

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...