What I Cooked Last Night

By throwing seeds everywhere in spring I had hoped that the north-facing garden bed that gets full blistering sun would develop a wild, cottage garden-like appearance and grow its own canopy to protect the bare soil from the heat. The strategy worked. Zinnias and marigolds were rioting alongside mini tomatoes; there were even a few swelling corn ears. However, some vines, zucchini and pumpkin, looked like going out of control and tendrils were already climbing nearby trees ... The tomatoes had to be hunted amongst all the foliage. The hidden ones seemed to be ripening first. Years ago, we used to eat these at just-picked temperature at the height of summer, cut in slices with salt and vinegar and served on lightly-toasted ciabatta touched with olive oil lightly infused with garlic. The salty acidic sweetness contrasting with the earthy garlicky bread, alternating with sips of chilled white wine with the sun almost down was a building block, if not the entire edifice, of late summer 200...

 Murder in the Wind. The Empty Trap. All These Condemned.  These and others - many others - covered the days. John D. McDonald. Trash fiction. Good trash fiction. Very good trash fiction. Not even trash, actually. He wrote The Executioners , but I read that a few years ago. Brought back the horrible face of Robert de Niro. Nobody knows The Executioners , but everyone knows Cape Fear , the movie they made of it. I can't get that bite out of my mind. John D. McDonald. Two hundred and sixty-two days of waiting. Not really waiting; just stopping. A moratorium of the kind my hippie sister never attended in 1970. A torment from nowhere, a Job imposition that Job never endured. Or maybe he did. I forget. Maybe I should read the Book of Job again.  A hell on earth, but he held up. Or did he? Seven thousand pages, thirty-seven novels, fifteen non-fiction books, innumerable Spectators , Economists , Classic and Thoroughbred Sportscars , five hundred and twenty-four newspapers. * Th...

Douglas Ling wasn’t the only one. There were two others. Jack Clancy lectured on Westerns and even looked like John Wayne (if Wayne had had a beard and were Irish). Clancy was a big man possessed of a rare intelligence in an academic world uninfected by wokeness. Clancy could discuss the significance of gunfights in 1940s outlaw films without triggering anyone. John O'Hara was similarly intelligent, a noteless lecturer who never stumbled, an unashamed academic who wrote prolific programme notes for several Melbourne International Film Festivals.  Essentially, in Top Gear terms, the big extrovert Clancy was the Jeremy Clarkson of cinema studies; John O’Hara the diffident intelligent James May - leaving the diminutive Douglas Ling as the smarter-than-anyone Richard Hammond. Were students of cinema in 1979-80 spoiled with an over-abundance of sheer unbridled cinematic knowledge and intelligence? Yes.  But in the posthumous best film lecturer awards, Douglas Ling wins. He knew eve...

A vast red oxide desert passed in front of my eyes. I'd seen it another time, but that was in another place. I'd once crossed a red plain in South Australia in a car, but that barren flatness looked the same as what I was looking at now, a movie set in another continent; an endless sky looming over a sea of hot red nothing, a widescreen alien landscape too big to comprehend. Later, about eleven that night, I stumbled out of the theatre onto a wet, cold, monochrome a'Beckett Street and walked up the hill through street-lit silver raindrops to where I'd parked my old Volvo. Single carb, manual transmission, choke. Home before midnight. Supper: a glass of red wine and a plate of pasta with the evening newspaper spread across the table, but my mind is still half-away in that hot red desert. The disconnection of cinema from life is the real addiction.  On those cold, wet, bleak  Tuesday nights in the winter of 1979, we travelled from the 1930s to the modern era, but it was n...

The old Radio Theatre in Bowen Lane had heavy leather-faced seats that clunked up at the end of screenings as cinemagoers exited their seats, creating a kind of mechanical applause. The small cinema had been built in the 1940s to screen technical teaching films for science and engineering students. When I came along in 1975 the campus's technical functions had largely been supplanted by the new arts courses. Suddenly there was a thing called cinema studies. The first film screened that year was a master study in human nature made at the dreg-end of the 1960s by Sydney Pollack, its title being the rationalisation used by one character to murder another: They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Then the journey began. We went back to Lumiere and rolled into a new century with Méliès, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance (18-year-old students were adults in 1975 and consequently able to deal with controversy); Lloyd and Chaplin; the Soviet Eisenstein and early Americ...

The plot of Everyman by Philip Roth is literally that - a plot. The 2006 novel opens in a cemetery at which the main character is about to be buried. Relatives and friends are in attendance; a few grieving, some present from mere duty: and showing it. The rest of the short novel retraces his final years of regret, illness and vain attempts to retain health while regretting his life as a failed father and husband, a philanderer, and a jealous younger dying brother of his older, healthy sibling. Then he dies. It was a clear hot cloudless morning, close to midday. Blairgowrie beach was a blue and white colourcard flecked with primary-colour sun umbrellas. Heads in the water, too far out to recognise, disappeared and resurfaced. The shelf is gradual here; you can wade out three hundred metres without getting your head wet. A dark blue line beyond that point is deeper water. Away to the right, houses on Mt Martha twinkled white in the midday sun. I opened the book. Is it autobiographical? ...

It's commonly called pasta marinara, but marinara in Italy is a tomato sauce. The more correct name is pescatora, but I'm not getting into any arguments so let's just use English and call it spaghetti with mixed seafood. It still tastes the same. As long as you cook it well, which means not too long. You can buy 'marinara' mix at the supermarket but it is usually yesterday's seafood chopped, frozen and then thawed for sale. I usually buy fresh components: a fillet of salmon and some fresh prawns, calamari, scallops and mussels.  Cook spaghetti to al dente. While it's cooking, heat some oil in a pan, saute some onion and then garlic - don't hold back on the garlic; garlic and seafood is a match made in Atlantis - and take great care not to burn anything. Add wine and slosh it around.  Now add the seafood, some tomato passata and a handful of chopped parsley leaves and stalks. While being generous with everything else in this dish, add only enough passata ...

The fill-in announcer on RRR just now (The Cave, formerly the Skullcave) was discussing his relationship with disco, which was fractious.  Apart from some early tentative crossover hits, disco eventually veered far from its soul-funk roots and descended into a musical hellhole from which it never recovered, leading to desperate attempts at new musical directions, such as the robotic new romantics using drum machines and synthesisers instead of  'instruments'.  One year in the mid-1970s disco collided with Christmas, resulting in a disco-fied Joy To the World strung out into a zombie-like metronomic medley with everything from Silent Night to White Christmas. It was the era of prawn cocktails, avocado vinaigrette, vol au vents and Coolabah moselle at the table; with guests wearing flared suits and six-inch ties - so the whole shooting match had a kind of balanced bad taste flavour about it. Disco passed but some of the world’s worst music continues to be reserved espe...

Eggplant - known in England and other parts as the more evocative aubergine - is an underused vegetable, unless you are Lebanese or Turkish and then you probably have it coming out your ears. No wonder: eggplant is a marvellous vegetable/fruit/berry (used as a vegetable, looks like a fruit, is botanically a berry). This distant relative of the tomato, chilli pepper, potato and tobacco (eat twenty eggplants for breakfast and forgo your morning cigarette) has a chameleonic ability to adapt to other flavours and ingredients, absorbing their flavours and goodness. It was a late night. I had been to a committee meeting; long, but not as long as they used to be. The new president/chairman had taken over and had made good on his vow - and my insistent proposal - to cut meeting times to ninety minutes, if not seventy-five. For years they had on occasion blown out to midnight, from an eight p.m. start. They had been occasions for crusted-on committee hogs to have proxy social lives, monthly pl...

It was a warm day, two in the afternoon. Slightly overcast. Southerly breeze. I drove southwest out of Melbourne, but not too far out. I took the four-lane Geelong freeway to the C114 turnoff and instead of swinging in a big right arc back across the freeway to Lara like most of the traffic, I took a left turn down the long lonely road towards the coast.  After a while, it became one lane for both directions so that you have to pull over when a vehicle comes from the other direction. Then the blacktop ended altogether, and the car crunched along gravel towards a leftwards sweep. A sign warned 'No passing on bridge' and the road narrowed even more. I rumbled over the bridge, swung back to the right, and the track stopped dead a few hundred yards farther along in a big careless patch of bitumen under a jumble of fishing boats and trailers. A slipway disappeared under a seaweedy stretch of water probably five miles across to a peninsula in the distance. Small semi-visible figures ...

 At long last, after several lockdown-caused false starts,  The Moonee Ponds Club: Celebrating 125 Years  was launched on 6 December at the Club's premises at 622 Mount Alexander Road, Moonee Ponds.  3AW's Pub of the Week raconteur/gastronome/comedian/CouldbeenChampion/Moonee Ponds notable Tony Leonard emceed the launch of the iconic club with a laugh-generating off-the-cuff ramble ranging over his upbringing in neighbouring Footscray, the price of Ben Ean moselle in the 1980s and a snub of his alma mater: he once launched a book for Xavier College - an Eastern suburbs school for social-climbing Catholics - in which the attendees descended on the book table, grabbed copies and immediately turned to the index to find out how many 'mentions' they had. (I had been discussing with him prior to the launch that very reason why we had strategically decided not to include an index in my book.) Tony Leonard even kindly offered to purchase a copy of the book, so impressed was ...

It was the biggest short-lived panic of all time. I pointedly don't listen to morning radio; particularly the crybaby shock jock, the oracle of timid men, the un-pied piper of the craven, the timid choirmaster of catastrophists. But there he was, or at least his voice, coming out of a radio perched behind the counter of some shop I'd had to visit, talking up the chances of catastrophe via a new virus mutation, and frightening what life was left in his fabric-masked listeners cowering behind the ironed curtains of their fortress homes. It was just after 9am, Monday morning. I waited. The shop was busy. Now the voice on the shelf behind the counter, treble unaccountably amplified so you could hear every sibilant letter, had one of those pop psychologists on air, who was explaining in carefully enunciated syllables the importance of, when there is bad news, breathing slowly, not jumping to catastrophic conclusions, and being thankful for what you had. Small mercies in bad times. B...

No, not a mid-seventies psychedelic swirlfest, or a 1990s retro tribute to that era. This seven-minute sparse-lyriced, choral-backed musical rollercoaster ride was released last month. Don't believe anyone who says there's no good music any more. 'Miracle Drum' by Even from El Reno Music, Melbourne 2021.

Inverted commas? Yes: the definition is unclear. Pasticcio literally translated is a mess, although the Italians use it as the name of a dish in which ingredients are combined and baked. A combination of vegetables - as the following recipe is - separated by pasta sheets would be what we call a lasagne. But because the word lasagne refers specifically to the pasta sheets, the dish is a mess, just like this paragraph. Starting from the bottom I placed onion rings in the base of the casserole with a scored clove of garlic and a splash of olive oil. (Some recipes fry the onions first but this worked fine.) Then I added layers of very finely sliced potato; not so finely sliced pumpkin; pre-salted, rinsed and grilled sliced eggplant; sliced red capsicum; and sliced zucchini. I interspersed each of these with enough basil-infused tomato purée to coat the layers. When three-quarters up to the top of the dish, I tipped in half a cup of chicken stock to keep it all moist and flavoursome, and a ...