What I Cooked Last Night

.... get hung up, feed the ducks with a bun. (Ronnie Lane and Steve Marriott, 1967)

Of course, my mother knew she had an absent step-son as well as her own seven. She was a conservative Catholic stay-at-home mother with prudent values and a handle on economic management that made frugality feel like luxury. Hence the annual holidays to Inverloch or Somers, with chocolate at night and new Puffin books to read on the beach by day. The seven-children anecdote in the previous post was brought to mind by a couplet in the Weekend Australian. In what should once have been a glaring non sequitur, foreign affairs reporter Greg Sheridan wrote the following two curt but devastatingly telling sentences: Liberal Democrats deeply dislike Barrett. She is a conservative Catholic with seven children .

I was the middle (fourth; three either side) of seven until the half-brother materialised one day. My father took the phone call in another room and returned haggard to the harsh kitchen light where we sat in a ticking silence until he told us the story. He had married a few years after the war. She was on a rebound, someone in Queensland. John was born, but she went back to the Queensland home; left him and my father. Then she changed her mind and John was despatched north. Later, tragedy struck when their own two children died in an accident. Suddenly they couldn't look at John. He was adopted out and lost contact. Years passed, and then that phone call in 1978. He had traced his - my - father.

They opened for the Rolling Stones, the Searchers, Slade and the Moody Blues but never had a huge hit until 1975's Slippin' Away , a mournful ballad of which radio stations often chopped off the dramatic key gear-change near the end. They were Max Merritt (who died this week) and the Meteors. Look for my favourite track, Good Feelin' , with saxophone break and outro by Bob Bertles. It's probably on YouTube but I still have my copy on cassette taped directly off 3XY in 1972 complete with back-announcement by Laurie Bennett.

That last monster paragraph in yesterday's post came about because this new publishing platform or template or whatever they call it did not allow me to break it, and the text kept scrolling up and disappearing like an overwound blind. I will have to reconsider whether I continue with Blogger or find an alternative. Suggestions welcomed.

This is a work in progress, or more accurately a recipe in evolution. The result is an aromatic, flavoursome, spicy dish with a touch of sweetness to temper the heat (if you use a lot of chili). Boil your rice. My current favourite is good quality Basmati; the kind that develops long grains - up to a centimetre - that fork apart easily and don't stick together. I put the rice in the pot, tip the water in and set it to boil. Two cups water to one cup of rice? Start there and then modify. There are too many variables. I add a couple of teaspoons of turmeric for colour more than anything.  In these unprecedented times ... That was an error. The radio is on in the background and I accidentally typed what I heard. Don't copywriters use a Thesaurus any more?  Finely chop an onion and a quarter of a red capsicum and fry them gently with a scored clove of garlic in some peanut oil. Stir through a crushed cardomom pod, a shake ...

We live in a world of truth and lies. Ask Johnny Cash. Man has been forever confronted with right and wrong, fact and fiction, truth and falsehood. Is that tiger a maneater? Try patting it. Is that plant poisonous? Eat it and find out. Can that neighbouring tribe just over the hills be trusted? They gave us food. They could be OK. True or false. The game never ends. It's an endless cycle that allowed man to evolve by trial and error: the only method that works. Animals don't search for truth. They search for food and reproduction and rest. The search for truth is evolution at work. But it tricks people. When real events seem so unlikely that they challenge credibility, the alternative starts to look better. The prime minister went for a swim at a Portsea ocean beach and completely disappeared. Where was his security? There was none. That pushed credibility to its limits. So they said the Chinese got him. In submarines. A couple of years later the US sent a metal cylinde...

We have trudged a muddy path through winter. 588mm of rainfall this year compared to 250-odd at this time last year; so a hill of shoes recognisable as such through their coat of mud sits at the front door like patient dogs. Waiting for someone to clean them. I do it. Not obsessive; I just like clean shoes. People ask me if I have new running shoes and I reply, no, I just cleaned them. I scrub them and then I put them in the washer, I tell them. You can't do that, they reply. Yes you can, I tell them. You just don't use hot water. If you scrub them well enough first they don't need it. OK, maybe I am obsessive. Nine sentences about cleaning shoes. I should see a psychiatrist. Lie on the couch and tell me all about your shoes, says doctor. Is a psychiatrist a doctor? I don't know. I once had a brand new pair of Onitsuka Tiger X-Caliber GTs, I tell him. And the dog got them and destroyed them on the first day. They still smelled new. Red and blue flowing stripes on pu...

The intensity map radiates out from the population centres and fades and dies in the far reaches of the States where it meets the borders. Trouble here. The idiot-class State politicians that were elected to enact politically correct legislation are hopelessly out of their depth. Closing borders bang-shut is cutting the meagre populations and many families in two. Or even three. Bickering amongst themselves, the State fishwives (of both sexes, if you like) have managed to destroy communities. In reply to one case (and there are thousands) in which a family was twenty kilometres from a hospital - which was on the wrong side of the border - was told to fly to Sydney, quarantine for a fortnight and take it from there. 1600 kilometre round trip. The Queensland premier blithely added Queensland has its hospitals and so does New South Wales. A farmer received a kind suggestion from a bureaucrat to fly 45 tonnes of hay to Sydney and then truck it back to his paddock 45 kilometres over the b...

I got it out of an old cookbook but the children said I'd already made it; just in a slightly different version. In any case you don't need a recipe for a dish containing potato, cheese and onion. The three ingredients are fellow travellers and kind of just collide. In the presence of heat, they know what to do, and turn alchemy-like into that clichéd term, comfort food, which means something you don't quite make it to a chair to start eating. The title was 'pan haggerty', but Wikipedia shows several different names for it. That proves the point: the recipe was never written down because it was so intuitively obvious. Pan Haggerty. Peel and cut two large potatoes into very thin slices. Do the same with two onions. Cook the onions in some oil in a pan until just softened. Lay some of the sliced potatoes into the bottom of an oiled baking dish and caress them with melted butter. I use a paint brush (that has never been used to paint - I bought one for the p...

Grade Three: she was only nineteen and just out of teachers' college. She introduced classic music and travel. Her name was Miss Burns. That year, Petula Clark started a massive run of smash hits and she and Miss Burns kind of merged. Later, there were others. Lulu smashed with To Sir With Love in 1967 but her apogee - if singers can have one of those - was the minor hit Oh Me Oh My, a soul-infused love song that never rose into the year's top 100 in '69. 1967 also saw Brit Sandie Shaw impossibly catchy with Puppet on a String - once heard never forgotten. Meanwhile, Morgana King's soul-fired coloratura went in a totally different gospel/soul direction and the Fifth Dimension were on fire. I was at a parish fete one warm October day in 1967. They used to play a radio station over the loudspeaker in between prize draws on the spinning wheel. A southern accent came out of the speaker and the story was some kind of personal disaster and the guitar in front had a weird ...

8 p.m. A midwinter full moon rises over my poplar-ended street as the city falls silent.

I got through the checkpoint without being challenged, and proceeded into the territories that were my ancestral lands, and made my way through distantly familiar streets to the house in which I grew up in bucolic 1960s then-outer-suburban Melbourne, high on the hill overlooking the Maribyrnong valley. I found her snoozing in front of the television, which was shouting at full volume about some political issue. I turned it down slightly and went through to the kitchen where a small mountain of plates and pots and plastic meals-on-wheels containers rose up next to the sink. I made a start on the mountain but didn't get far because the sink wasn't draining. I put the brush down and wandered through the vastness of the house into an old dusty abandoned bedroom full of memories and linoleum. I opened a wardrobe and shoved several hundred 1960s ladies coats along the railing until I found an unused wire coat hanger. Returning to the kitchen, I unwound the coat hanger at the part w...

30 January 1919: The (Essendon) Health Officer, Dr. Flanagan, was informed of an outbreak of the deadly Pneumonic Influenza and immediate action was taken to prevent its spread. An inoculation program was commenced with 150 citizens presenting themselves for inoculation. Theatres were closed locally, and restrictions on Defence Department drills and church gatherings were being considered. Householders were advised to throw open their windows. The Mayor, Cr. Arthur Fenton, amid accusations of over-reaction, took full responsibility for actions taken as 11 mild cases were reported. 10 February 1919: The Essendon Gazette reported that local doctors were inoculating as many as 800 people a day against the disease; that many citizens were wearing masks; that large public gatherings were prohibited and church services were being cancelled, or attended in small numbers. The Public Library was closed, and schools would not open until further notice. Essendon High School was being converte...