What I Cooked Last Night

I started this blog in 2003 to record recipes, mostly ones that I had 'improvised' to put it mildly. The URL was ironic , because I was not a great cook. I'm OK now, can get around most recipes. I still don't like show-off, look-at-me recipes or meals, and I have never watched a reality cooking show on TV, and I'm not going to start now. However I did watch cooking shows produced by people who incorporated some kind of geographical context in their shows such as Mildura's Stefano di Pieri. A couple of the British chefs were good such as the straightforward Delia Smith and Scot Nick Nairn, while Antonio Carluccio's show was one of my weekly favourites. But the best cooking show of all time, in my opinion, was Two Fat Ladies . Clarissa Dickson Wright and Jennifer Paterson said what they thought and didn't give a toss what anyone else thought. Refreshing, entertaining and mature. Anyone wanting a look into a more freewheeling era with fewer cultural or ver...

And so we wind back the clock, past the GFC, the Y2K non-bug, the '87 crash, that '70s stagflation thing, the early '60s credit crunch, post-war austerity, two world wars with a depression in the middle, and a Boer war; and we crash land on page 245 of Martin Boyd’s The Cardboard Crown , where we find ourselves in the middle of the 1890s depression which, as always, followed a boom. Arthur is giving a party to welcome his relative Alice back from England. He notes: Nobody talked of anything but the financial crisis. Later, Alice, whose diary is the basis for the novel, records: '31 December. Dimanche. ... Went with Austin to the new cathedral. I do not like it ... hard, striped and confused ... No repose for the eye anywhere. They should whitewash it and hang up some good tapestries as at Arles. It needs softening. Sermon on the financial difficulty and trouble of this past year.' Then the narrator: As she listened to this financial sermon in the new striped cath...

The big autumn wet (most March rain since 1929 – and that fell in the first few days) ended and a longer period of warm sunny days came in. I went to bed, the smell of new cut grass and lavender stealing in the open window and the long stems of the rose bushes – almost up to the eaves – tapping against the house in the night air. The night was mild and I pushed down one blanket. It must have been well after midnight when I woke. I pulled up the other blanket. Near dawn, I woke again. This time I was cold, so I got out of bed and put on a warm top. In the morning I dressed warmer than the temperature – 26 celsius – warranted. I felt like I wasn't there. I felt weak. The day passed in a kind of surreal light as if I was watching it but not in it. That night was cooler but this time, towards morning, I threw the blankets off. I wasn't cold any more. I was hot. I sweated. That day I stayed home. The doctor had two questions: - Have you been overseas? - No. Not ever. - ...

I read John Wyndham's science fiction novels in 1972 across the long mild winter in the wooden building that housed Four Gold. The library had purchased new Penguin copies with newly designed covers combining clean negative images over 1970s-style fluoro backgrounds and now, decades later, I looked for them again for the boys, who are now the age I was then. I ordered new copies from Pictures and Pages. The publisher is still Penguin, but the cover art is new, each book themed with effete-looking (SOED def. 3) youths with pale faces, doe eyes and sensitive lips. One has a bird sitting on his head ( The Midwich Cuckoos ), one lichen growing on his face ( Trouble with Lichen ) and one sits in a deck chair on the seabed ( The Kraken Wakes ). What on earth was the publisher's brief to the cover artist? While I'm on the subject, the print and paper quality of these books is appalling. The type almost bleeds into the rough paper, on which you can see flecks of darker fibre, w...

Of course, it was an extraordinary coincidence that I had been a witness to both the Coles' home brand launch in Tooronga and to the northern suburbs store manager's acid comment about the brand on the other side of town. O (the literary 'O') yes! It was a long way from Tooronga to Pascoe Vale; so far distant that never had it been heard that any person from that hilltop eyrie looking imperiously across Gardiner's Creek (and no less a freeway than the Monash) had ever come to visit, or even pass through, that flat square of a suburb stretching itself taut from Hadfield's cream-brick nightmare in the north to hippy North Brunswick in the south, and North Coburg in the east before dropping off a western cliff at Gaffney Street into the muck of Moonee Ponds Creek and the murk of that other freeway, the Tullamarine; which is not to say it hadn't happened – but who, and when, and where, and why – was as lost in the unrecorded minutiae of life in a city of five ...

ABOUT A DECADE AGO. IN THE BOARDROOM OF A MAJOR NATIONAL SUPERMARKET CHAIN, TWENTY MARKETING PEOPLE (AND ME AS A FREELANCE WRITER ON AN IN-HOUSE VISIT) ARE SITTING AROUND A MASSIVE TABLE. THE CHIEF MARKETING EXECUTIVE HAD BRIEFED THE COMPANY'S ADVERTISING AGENCY TO COME UP WITH A NEW NAME FOR ITS HOUSE BRAND LINE OF GROCERIES AND WAS MIFFED WHEN THE AGENCY FAILED TO PRODUCE AN EXTENSIVE POWERPOINT PRESENTATION, PRESENTING ITS NAMING IDEAS ON TRADITIONAL PHYSICAL BOARDS INSTEAD. THE SUPERMARKET CHAIN, IN A FIT OF PIQUE, HAS DECIDED TO SPURN ITS AGENCY AND PRODUCE THE IN-HOUSE BRAND ITSELF. SMILING MARKETING PERSON NAMED PAMELA (FIFTIES, BOBBED FAKE-BLONDE HAIRCUT, RED LIPSTICK, EARRINGS TO MATCH, CHAIN OF CHUNKY RED STONES, SLEEVELESS WHITE LINEN DRESS, RED HEELS): Thanks, everyone. I'm glad you could all make it this morning. It's an important day in the annals of supermarket retailing in this country. And an important day in the history of great brands, because today we ...

IT WAS EVENING AFTER A LONG DAY'S SHOOT IN THE HILLS BEHIND THE LAKESIDE CITY OF SAN CARLOS BARILOCHE, CIRCA 1992. THE LAST RAYS OF THE SUN HAD TURNED THE RED TERRACOTTA ROOF TO BURNING ORANGE AND THE WHITE WALLS TO GOLD. BEYOND THE HOUSE, SOME EUCALYPTS WERE SWAYING GENTLY IN THE WARM EVENING BREEZE AND THEIR BARE, LITHE GOLDEN LIMBS WERE AS SENSUOUS AS ANY FEMALE'S. WELL NOT QUITE, BUT ALMOST. YES, EUCALYPTS. I WAS TOYING WITH A DRINK AND LUSTING AFTER THE DELICIOUS AROMA OF PRIME ARGENTINIAN BEEF ROASTING ON THE BARBECUE. SOME KIND OF BOSSA NOVA MUSIC DRIFTED OUT OF THE HOUSE AND CAME ON THE WARM BREEZE, LIKE SAND BEING SHAKEN IN A GLASS BOTTLE. SHE WAS SITTING ON THE CHAIR OPPOSITE. HER EYES WERE PROBABLY DARK BROWN, BUT THEY FLASHED BLACK AND SOMETHING ELSE. MAYBE LIGHTNING. HER HAIR WAS SO BLACK IT SHONE ALMOST BLUE IN THE DARKENING SHADOWS. SHE WAS WEARING A SIMPLE SLEEVELESS COTTON DRESS, A RED FLORAL PRINT OVER CREAM. HER SKIN WAS SEVERAL SHADES DEEPER THAN THE CRE...

Then, that book again; the one by the sun-drenched pool in Deniliquin that made time stand still , even as the sky became a blue bruise and twenty cent coin raindrops fell flat on the ground. A Jimmy Webb song cannot be explained. You either get it or you don't. The Temptations (according to the story) knocked back 'By the Time I Get to Phoenix' because it didn't have a chorus. You may as well knock back a Mozart clarinet concerto because it doesn't have a flute. When Glen Campbell got to 1975 and sang 'Rhinestone Cowboy' I wondered whether Campbell had changed, or it was just that I had grown up. He'd moved on from Jimmy Webb songs. There was air around the earlier lyrics that just wasn't there any more. Someone once described 'Witchita Lineman' as the first existential country song. No-one has ever properly defined 'existentialim' beyond a kind of 'shut-up and enjoy the scenery' kind of non-philosophical theory espoused ...

I was out walking in the early afternoon sunshine just like the song said (see Noel Coward, Leon Russell or Joe Cocker). It was a sultry afternoon, about 40 degrees. The streets were empty. It was just too hot. I was heading west on a wide, quiet street on the better side of the railway line, where the 1950s yellow brick houses sit behind neat gardens and lawns and stretch out in rows over the hill, undisturbed by the box apartments that are turning the suburb into a grey and black monotone closer to the railway station. As I came to a crossroad, a ute came around and pulled up and the driver leaned out and yelled something to me. He was red-faced and lost. Old but not elderly, some kind of a tradesman, and looking like he was looking for something. Pardon? I said. He named a street. I pointed. I know most of the streets around here. I stepped onto the road, went up to the car window. Have you got a Melways? I said. He had better than that. He had a phone. I pointed again, but ...

The sun didn't set on Tuesday night; it disappeared behind clouds of dust. The sky was a variegated colour or shade or tone or whatever you want to call it of the kind of brown often referred to as 'beige', 'camel', 'taupe', 'fawn', or 'mushroom'. Actually no - it was coffee: a much better name than any of the other five. The coffee sky was backlit by the westering golden sun and it glowed and looked like an enormous painted set for some epic western movie. The variegated coffee was dust from north-west Victoria, probably around the Hattah-Kulkyne national park, being blown south-east towards the city. It rained during the night and next morning everything was coffee-coloured. Cars, fences, even the local church steeple had turned coffee. It was not dust; it had no real grain to it. Anything heavier had fallen on its several hundred kilometre airborne journey. It was just powder. Coffee powder. *Apologies to Roger Greenaway and Roger C...

The cabin was in a caravan park located just outside town, on the edge of the Edward River, an anabranch of the Murray River. You wouldn't miss the caravan park. It was on the main highway a few hundred metres before it curved across the bridge into town. We had left the big smoke - which was literally the big smoke - early on an intensely hot Wednesday, but it wasn't that bad. Melbourne having 'the worst air quality in the world' was hyperbole. The smoke seemed to disperse as we moved north on the Hume Highway, turning off past Seymour via Shepparton; but that night there was still a brilliant red moon, the red of the desert, not the coppery glow you would expect of a smoky atmosphere. The cabin was perched on the edge of a valley which ran alongside the caravan park, a dry watercourse which must have been some other sub-branch of the river. The land is flat all around here so the water wanders where it will. If it is there. The day wore on. I found refuge from ...

Timber is better than steel or concrete : French architects want the roof of the fire-ravaged Notre-Dame Cathedral to be rebuilt in wood and not in metal or concrete. One of the heads of the country's biggest architects' body said reconstructing the roof in anything other than the original wood would be a mistake. The intervention by Eric Wirth of the Guild of French Architects comes amid controversy over French President Emmanuel Macron's wish for the spire of the 13th-century monument to be given a "contemporary" touch. ... "The most modern and ecological material today is wood," Wirth said Wednesday, which, as well as being more fire-resistant than the alternatives, also traps carbon, he insisted. ... "The cathedral has been there for 800 years. Had it been built in concrete or steel it would not still be there," he added. "Even with all the (chemical) protection treatments, given the intensity of the blaze... the steel would have held ...

I got through the book in a couple of hot afternoons in a chair in the shade, slightly cooled by a south-westerly off Bass Strait. Eric Burdon might not have been all that easy to get along with. He all but admits it in Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood . He makes band decisions on the run, is often drunk or drugged, and lands in prison or goes bust more than once in the course of three hundred pages of the misadventures of a Geordie. He gets himself into trouble on just about every page. Or other people do. There is little chronology. The chapters wriggle over the decades like the squirming, dying notes of 'House of the Rising Sun'. The book is essentially a series of anecdotes told in Geordie conversational. Burdon may be the least rock-star-like rock star in existence given the tone of the book. He doesn't even talk much about his songs, let alone rhapsodise. This is a good thing. Burdon is no bore pinioning the reader with the minutiae of recording sessions, or endl...

The property falls away to the west resulting in views of incredible sunsets on hot summer nights (and nights in winter, for that matter, when the sun has wheeled right around 45 degrees north). The plunging garden is terraced; twelve years ago I planted a plumbago hedge of four plants along 18 feet of ornamental lattice guarding a drop of ten feet to a garden bed below. The hedge was to prevent two small boys climbing on the lattice and risk falling, should the ornamental lattice give way. No longer required. The boys are teenagers now. The plumbago had done its job. Over the dozen years, it had grown to twelve feet in height and had moved out about 18 feet from the fenceline. That's what? 12' x 18' x 18' in volume? Whatever. The point is I had to clear it. Plumbago produces a magnificent green façade with stunning lilac foliage in late spring and is totally gorgeous all year round. But beauty is skin deep. That eighteen square foot of volume behind the green a...