What I Cooked Last Night

The price of meat has gone through the stratosphere as has the price of everything else so it's back to austerity cooking, if it ever left. I always cook austerely, if austere means making the most of everything and paying the least for the best. The money goes on paying too much - mixed salad leaves in a plastic bag cost anything up to $50-plus in supermarkets, but at the greengrocer they are $11-$12 in bulk. You're paying for the packaging which increasingly is ending up in the environment and ultimately ingested by animals and humans (see current reporting on the subject - no hyperlink required; it's all over the news). So it's back to lamb shanks. Yes, I do realise the net kilogram price is higher because you can't eat the bone, but it still works out cheaper than eye fillet steak for example. I've done lamb shanks a thousand ways over the years but versatility is what makes them work so well. Throw them in a pot with water, salt and aromatics and you've...

It was autumn and humid, early evening. A Handel opera, Giulio Cesare, was playing on the radio on 3MBS. It had been composed in 1724, the announcer said: two years short of three centuries. Given what is going on in the world now, no one can really get their head around that. I had been looking in the back of the cupboard. I had a packet of spaghetti, and some olives and capers in the larder. What to make? I found a can of tomatoes. Listening to the countertenor, I fried some garlic and onion in a little olive oil and added the tomatoes to the pan. Then I threw in a dozen pitted black olives chopped in halves, and a handful of capers, and left it to reduce slightly. The aroma filled the house. It hit me when I went out to the back garden to get some oregano and parsley from the herb patch, an old concrete laundry tub. It hit Casper, too, the foster greyhound who might be staying and might not be staying, depending on his behaviour, who raised his nose to the north-west breeze that sou...

We came out of the ti-tree tunnel and walked onto that beach of memories, the two teenagers the age I was then, seeing with eyes I once gazed through, not yet carrying the burden of having seen too many things. It was as if I were accompanying my own past, times two. They went off with their sister and their mother on a walk along the sand to the yacht club, where a giant arc of shoreline cuts right in close the clubhouse, buttressed by a wall of stone. I did what I often do on beaches these days. I fell asleep. * It had been a torrid January day. I had spent most of it floating around on a sea as flat as a tennis court on an old tyre inner tube. Then I'd returned to the old rambling house that my parents rented each summer for a fortnight. That year I'd made it, through seniority, since a couple of siblings had left home, to the double-room bungalow that was an annex to the old house. It was all old stained timber and panelled walls and a picture window overlooking the bay and...

The steep shaded path from the road down to the beach was as it had been all those years ago, winding under a ti-tree canopy and levelling out before opening suddenly on blinding sand and sea. One difference: the path was shorter now, the relentless circular wash of the bay having eaten into the foreshore over time. They were always building groynes and piling up rocks and trucking in sand, but the cruel sea just swept them all away again. It was a humid Sunday, early afternoon. We had driven across the peninsula from the carnival side, past vineyards and through forested valleys where knots of brown ponies carrying school children can sometimes be glimpsed through the trees, like questing hobbits. Half an hour later a Westernport Bay slideshow had appeared from behind the crest of a hill. Somers sits on a lip of the peninsula midway between quiet southern seaside towns with hedges as clipped as their accents, and a naval base and deep-sea harbour at Hastings to the north. At low tide ...

Now, yet another pasta: 'capunti paesani' by Squisito turned up in Vinnie's Fresh in Sydney Road. ‘Capunti' resemble pea pods (the name does not translate directly: it refers somehow to fingers pressing the pasta, making the indentations look like peas in a pod). All these varieties are not mere novelty: the different shapes provide texture and taste variables. Perhaps radiatori (resembling automotive radiators) and ruote (wheels) take the concept a bit too far. Or maybe they're made in Turin or Modena for revheads. I cooked the capunti for little more than ten minutes although the label prescribed thirteen; apparently the type of flour used in their manufacture means they stay al dente and hold their shape longer where softer floured types tend to throw gluten and fall apart. While the pasta was cooking I fried a chorizo sausage chopped into halved discs along with a chopped red onion and a chopped sweet capsicum (the long conical one). Just before these were done ...

Time stands still on a steamy hot evening at a country cricket oval, a pale green circle in a vast sweep of brown stretching to the west horizon, a high plain almost outside the suburbs of Melbourne. A pavilion of corrugated iron and timber sash windows, 1950s, leans tired like an old man pausing on a walking frame, and a brick farm shed on the other side of the oval is shrinking into the advancing wild shrubbery. Behind a long fence, off-white shapes are stealthy: sheep in the front paddock of an adjoining farm. The scene is as timelessly bucolic as a nineteenth-century George Cole oil painting - if you ignore the unending traffic murmur to the oval's north, an arrow-straight freeway to the new gunmetal-housed suburbs beyond.  The oval had been in full sun at five o'clock, but as the game wears on a dark line hatted by the corrugated pavilion's shadow creeps across the green as the under-16 away team, batting second, slowly racks up runs, chasing 117. The eleven-year-old, ...

The world doesn't need another spaghetti bolognese recipe, so I've given it the title above. However, what passes for bolognese can sometimes do with improvement, so to go back to the source (no pun intended) occasionally could be a good idea. The concept is simple: it should be homely, robust and appetising: and that's just the aroma. If you ever walk down Little Italy (Lygon Street or even Hardware Lane) at eleven-thirty in the morning, what stops you in your tracks is that steamy, herbal aroma of a sauce in its early stages; carrots and onions and wine bewitching the air. The pasta best suited to this sauce is a flat, thin one made with eggs; last night I used pappardelle which provides greater surface area for the sauce to cling to; a kind of fork-driven conveyor belt to your mouth. I diced a few slices of pancetta and fried it in a little olive oil in a large pot before adding a diced carrot, a finely chopped stick of celery and half a chopped onion. I chased these aro...

I had been listening to strangely squeaky hold music, and now I was talking again, trying to negotiate some understanding of what had been stolen and what hadn't; if anything. Yes, I said, my car was a green 1999 model, but the plates it is currently wearing are, as you said, from a silver 2003 model. Therefore - (yes: I actually said 'therefore' in a telephone conversation with a cop) - if you check the VicRoads database (I continued, doing his job for him) you can compare the VIN (vehicle identification number) of the two cars. That will show you that the 924-suffixed plates do not align with my car. I'll make a note, he said, an answer that was both non-commital and non sequitur-ish. He hung up. Nothing happened for three months, except that I saw my car again, wearing the same plates, and I phoned the sighting through to the police again. Last week, the phone rang. This is Corey, the caller announced, from the police. We've found your car, he told me brightly. I...

The fleeting glimpse I caught of my car as it flew by was like seeing a girlfriend on a train with another man; except I was not on a train and nor was my car. It was driving west along Bell Street, having been stolen a month earlier. I noted the registration plates which had obviously been stolen from another vehicle, went home and looked them up on the VicRoads public database. Then I rang the police. Can you still see the car, they asked me. No, I said. I saw it going down Bell Street. Was I supposed to chase it? No good then, said the police. Can't do anything. That was kind of obvious, I thought, but the important thing was that telling them what plates the car was wearing would help identify it. Well, here's the registration number, I carried on, imagining the cop noting it down on a scratch pad. He put me on hold for five minutes while I listened to something that sounded like twenty people wearing crystal-soled shoes learning to dance on parquetry. Looks like it's n...

One very hot day eleven Kodachrome-memory years ago I was reading Ernest Hemingway's Islands in the Stream  while sitting in a fold-up chair on the lawn in the dappled shade of a ti-tree at the Oak Park pool. It was mid-afternoon. The boys were lightning streaks in the white-blue water. Echoed shouts could be heard from the waterslide that is no longer there. An unseen train's rumble crossed Pascoe Vale Road from the parallel track behind the high apartments on its east side. From one of these apartments, a dark figure emerged from its second floor to hang some wet clothing items on the wrought-iron balcony before disappearing again with the faint thud of a slammed door. A plane made a buzzsaw drawl as it inched across the sky. All of these things were half-noticed; a parent's instinctive mental note-taking while monitoring children around water.  In a while the boys came back into the shade for food, splashing and shaking like spaniels, a five- and a six-year-old with rave...

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...