What I Cooked Last Night

On that cold, bleak night I was out late at the shops: it must have been about nine o'clock. It would be a late dinner. The car radio was chattering to itself. I turned it up slightly. Behind the voice were sound effects, like a radio play. Behind the soft commentating voice that sounded very much like the late Whispering Ted Lowe but wasn't, there was a clatter of metal on stone, a military screech here and there, a distant trumpet, and a faraway purr of drums: noises off (in the theatrical sense). The radio play continued as I drove down Pascoe Vale Road into Moonee Ponds and pulled into Pratt Street. In an apartment overlooking the carpark, part of a screen could be seen in an uncurtained upstairs window of an apartment. The head of a horse was visible, until it disappeared stage-right into an obscured section of the screen. The supermarket was brightly over-fluoro-d and vast and empty, except for some shelf stackers dressed in their dirty green corporate colours, like tired...

That morning I drove to the station and caught the train to the city, getting off at shadowy Melbourne Central and riding the escalator up into Swanson Street and the light of an early spring day. By eleven - the ideal time for a quiet coffee, after the breakfast stragglers and before the lunch crowd - a glass cup holding a rich brew of chocolate brown topped with a tawny golden spindrift sat on the bar in front of me at Pellegrini's at the top of Bourke Street, where nothing changes except the clientele. Later I walked through Myer and several laneways and eventually disappeared underground into one of the city's last remaining second-hand bookshops, Melbourne Basement Books, in Flinders Street. You could spend a week there and get through only half the books. By two o'clock I was on the train again, having walked under the clocks where once piles of just-pressed newspapers would fly out like those momentous edit points in old movies. But there was a very odd thing. It ha...

The title of the novel Leafy Rivers is not some evocatively named bucolic setting as the first edition's (1967) green-leaved cover artwork might suggest. It is the central character's name: Mary Pratt Converse marries Reno Rivers, but retains the nickname her brother gave her as a child thanks to her indecisive habit of answering 'never "yes" or "no" but always "I'd just as lief." '. The novel covers not much more than one day in 1818 - but the bulk of it is in flashback; the building blocks of Leafy's life heaved into place by an author in complete command of language, atmospherics, and dialogue. Flashback: Leafy and Reno move to the Whitewater Valley after being gifted tenancy of a cabin by its landholder, Simon Yanders, who has abandoned it, having lost his wife to milk fever. Credit being short in 1818, he is later forced to foreclose on the couple causing Leafy to undertake a desperate, nightmarish and ultimately fateful two-...

1952 : 'The North Suburban Club annual picnic remained a popular event. 1952 was to be no different, with the date set for 17 February and all the usual preparations put in place; buses chartered, ten nines (nine-gallon beer barrels) ordered and admittance prices agreed upon. Eleven days before the picnic, King George VI died. A special committee meeting on Monday 11 February postponed the picnic 'owing to 17 February being declared the National Day of Mourning'. The picnic was held the following month, and the new monarch would eventually reign for more than half the length of the Club's entire existence*.' 2022 *Extract from Dum Vivimus Vivamus: A History of the Moonee Ponds Club by  Paul G. Kennedy. Clarity in Design Publishing, Melbourne, 2021.

A long time before the ugly visual numeronym '24/7' became a commercial boast, the end of each week signalled a day and a half of rest. The period of time from midday on Saturday until Monday morning was a welcome release from the endless scheduling of daily life. But there was a frantic price to be paid for the pleasure of being unhitched from the tyranny of the clock for thirty-six hours. On Saturday mornings I stood, a nine-year-old and several years either side of nine, at the back of a throng of jostling shoppers in a blue-tiled, glass-fronted butcher shop in Moonee Ponds. Amid the smell of sawdust, blood, and raw meat, the butcher signalled the start of his weekly meat auction by waving his knife through the air, as if he were cutting through the stench. Frenzied bargain-hunting shoppers pressed forward and all but fought each other for the trays of weekend-sustaining bounty: chops, scrag-ends, roasts, flaps, oxtails, heads, innards, smallgood end-of-rolls. Moonee Ponds w...

The recipe called it a 'tortilla', but no flatbread was in it. Instead, potato. That made it Spanish. In the late 1500s, the Spanish conquered the Incas, and sailed potato-laden ships victoriously back into Europe. (There was some competition from a pirate named Drake who carried the same loot into England while Raleigh did the same for Ireland.) Spanish potato and chorizo tortilla. Sice about half a kilogram of potatoes thinly and boil them for a few minutes until not quite tender. Meanwhile, whisk six eggs with a generous splash of milk and a few cranks of pepper. In a pan, fry a chopped onion, two chopped garlic cloves and one sliced chorizo sausage. Stir this continuously for around five minutes until the onion softens and the chorizo starts crisping. Then add a teaspoon of paprika, stirring it through. Line a greased baking dish with the par-boiled potato, including around the walls of the dish. Then add the onion and chorizo mixture, pour the whisked eggs over the top and...

The last thing I did that year was to read Animal Farm . There was nothing significant about it; the novel just happened to be at hand on that hot, close, steamy new year's eve. I finished it in a couple of hours, sweating on a stool propped up against a bench in the backyard art studio my father had built. The 'studio' was a neat white cube with a raked roof and windows to the north and west to catch the day and early evening sun. Inside, on a bench running the length of the room was a mess of paint tubes, brushes in old jars, palettes thick with hardened paint, bottles of thinners, oils and sealers; and paintings - finished, unfinished and barely started. The smell of a working art studio is bewitching. I sat amidst the linseedy redolence, switched on the downlight over the bench and opened the book. Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night ... . Some notes from an Emerson, Lake and Palmer track detached themselves from the radio on the shelf...

The best thing about the film documentary In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50 is that very little screen time is devoted to the progressive rock band's early days. While old concert footage makes music documentaries interesting in a nostalgic sense, it often renders them unremarkable as films. In this example, director Toby Amies could have mined over fifty years of King Crimson material but chose to focus on the present. King Crimson founding member Robert Fripp is a Toscanini-like dictatorial perfectionist who is a self-confessed monster to work with. He is narrow-minded, obsessively focussed, definite, immutable, and completely his own person. He is not unlikeable: far from it, he is merely a pedantic genius. He keeps telling Amies (who is trailing after him with a microphone and camera) that all his questions are 'shite'. Bill Rieflin, percussionist and keyboard player, had been in and out of the band on Robert Fripp's say-so over several years and...

We had gone, the twelve-year-old and I, to the house down the coast on Saturday night to work on the fallen tree on Sunday. I woke late, which for me is almost mid-morning; not anywhere near midday or, God forbid, even later. I'd feel like the day had been stolen. It had rained since midnight. The yard was sodden and there would be no cutting or burning. I drove down the hill to get the Sunday paper. No traffic; nothing. Even the horizon was gone; Port Philip Bay, dirty grey with drizzle met a leaden sky somewhere you couldn't see.  The deadness sparked one of those momentary flashes of memory, lighting on those wet 1960s Sunday mornings; bringing alive that remembered frieze: knots of people outside a church after mass - ladies under hats, men in dark suits - coated and bent against the driven rain; ignoring the weather for the sake of fifteen minutes' cordiality. You couldn't just rush off. Near the church door a booth that opened only on Sundays sold the accessories ...

The eastern side of Vincent Street shivered; the shops on the western side were ablaze in the late-morning sun. It was the morning after thge coldest night this year, cloudless with brittle stars frozen in an icy universe. Of course we had chosen the night to stay in Blackwood. The caravan park was little more than a creekside campground, and Blackwood is possibly the coldest place in Victoria outside the alps. We split between an ancient caravan and a Kmart tent. We were walking north on the sunny side of Vincent Street trying to defrost. I pushed open a shop door and found myself in cavernous semi-darkness. When my eyes adjusted to what might once have been a goldrush era hotel, I saw passageways vanishing into darkness, staircases winding out of sight, and shelves stretching to the ceiling, valiantly bearing thousands of books waiting in stoic mute silence for someone to read them again. I crept up some dark-stained stairs, moved along a narrow hall and came into a small space, poss...

I once posted a story about combining pasta and potatoes in the same dish; an unusual combination but certainly not an unlikely one. Must have been a couple of years ago .... (conducts search) .... couple of years?  - time flies: it was  posted in February 2007 .  This is different; it combines pork with fennel in a pasta dish without tomato- or cream-based sauce, but simply relies on the fragrance and sheer good flavour of its core ingredients. Pasta with pork sausage, zucchini and potato. I diced a large white zucchini and fried it in olive oil, with half a diced onion and two cloves of garlic. When done, I reserved the zucchini; and in the same pan, fried the crumbled meat of four coarse de-cased pork and caramelised onion sausages with some more onion and a scattering of fennel seeds. Meanwhile, I peeled two medium potatoes and diced them into small pieces. These I boiled - they need only a few minutes or they will soften and break up. For the pasta, I used the small ...

Broken shafts of late winter sun came through the window, having penetrated the lemon tree just outside, and crawled their way across the floor, pieces of broken gold. Shards of toast were scattered on the table along with open jars of Vegemite and peanut butter, a newspaper wet from a spilt cup of tea and other detritus of the type generated by late-rising, breakfasting teenagers. Now water was running in adjacent bathrooms and, on the fridge, the radio tuned to 3MBS-FM played to a mute audience of one. 8.23 a.m.  Her voice came out of the speaker like a lark ascending, apologies to Messrs. Vaughan-Williams and Meredith. It was a live version, recorded much later than the original 1965 studio recording which was gayer, younger. This later version was shot through with a sense of sad, yearning wistfulness but without any over-sentimentality. She lived in my suburb, but when I walked past her house on the way to St Monica's church on one of those rainy early 1960s winter Sunday morn...

It is some ancient tradition or belief system. One whose roots are lost in the tortuous once-hollow ribbons of time, blocked by centuries of sclerotic irrationality intermixed, confusedly, with an occasional random truth.  Never throw away certain items.   Why would you, when they still work? The can opener still opened. Kind of. The scissors still cut. Most things, anyway. Paper, thin cardboard.  Here's the proof sitting, opened, on the table: an 800-gram can of pears; Australian, not Chinese or Mexican or Thai or wherever else they can these things. Topped by my old Swing-a-Way can opener. A little crinkly around the edges. But open nonetheless. It was a bit of a twist. Metal must be harder these days. Everything else is. Have you tried opening a shrink-wrapped pack of, I don't know, flank steak? You know, that semi-hard plastic that has a thinner seal with a gripping point that gives you a millimetre to grasp between thumb and forefinger and that is so strong that...

I once wrote on this weblog that gnocchi out of a packet tasted like compacted Deb instant mashed potato: because that's what it essentially is. However, as gnocchi has grown in popularity the manufactured item has improved. It's called market forces. The major supermarkets now carry their own house brands in the refrigerated department. These are not as good as homemade gnocchi but are a satisfactory substitute. At the supermarket, I picked up a pack of Coles pumpkin gnocchi, a pack of Brussels sprouts, and some walnuts. As I was passing the fresh cheese section one of those mark-down stickers jumped out at me. They always do: I do like a bargain. It was a wedge of Roquefort cheese marked down from $12 to $3 due to an arbitrary use-by date nearing - I thought cheese improved with age. Roquefort at the price of cheddar. Gold. Later, I cooked the halved sprouts until they were just tender and bright green, then browned them slightly in a pan with flecks of prosciutto. I threw t...