What I Cooked Last Night

Distant thunder rumbled all night, invading my tortured dream of trying to row a boat backwards up a waterfall that rained swords. Morning got me out of the boat. Under a heavy low leaden sky we pulled out of town and across the Murray River, winding along the long low bridge that traverses its tributaries and creeks. I turned left onto the same B-road we'd taken yesterday, through the farm flatlands of northern Victoria, southbound this time. The opposite direction and a vastly altered sky turned the scene into something entirely different. Yesterday’s hot dry dusty wheatstalk horizon became a wet, pallid, metallic monochrome sci-fi set built for a movie about another planet. My, how it rained.  One of the teenagers had bluetoothed some music from the back seat. A repetitive piano motif stole out of the eight or however many speakers are in the car; they seem to be everywhere, under the seats, behind the dash, a couple in the roof lining; limpid wet notes dropping down like fat ri...

In the southern states mangoes are practically free. The couple of dollars you pay covers the cost of 3000 kilometres worth of trucking and cool storage along the way. Good luck locavoring one of these fat, voluptuous beauties; or running your interstate truck on solar for that matter. Even their variety names are sensuous: Honey Gold, Calypso, Kensington Pride. The combination of mango and coconut milk is a match made in, I don't know, some Pacific Island basking in year-round sun?  I chopped a large onion and half a capsicum and fried them in a non-stick pan in some peanut oil until they were softening, and then added a couple of chopped garlic cloves and the same volume of grated fresh ginger. Powdered ginger gives a different aroma and taste. After a minute or two I threw in a couple of tablespoons of curry powder and a dash of cumin, while stirring to stop everything sticking. Then two tablespoons of vinegar - just the ordinary kind - a can of coconut milk; and a mango, peeled...

The afternoon had been a disjointed dream sequence; a series of passing tableaux that stood still and faded into the next scene. The Murray River: a slow-moving curve of sun-mirrored innocence, its destructive October spate having moved along slowly and currently drowning a bunch of farms near its estuary hundreds of miles away in South Australia, from where Charles Stuart’s 1830 expedition to find a route to the sea had failed due having run into impassable sandbars. The crew had rowed the craft back upstream - against the current - 440 miles. I gazed at the silent deadly flurry in the middle of the river and knew why the crew had toiled in shifts, stopping for only an hour a day. Later. Silent drowsy mid-afternoon with dragonflies: a poolside lounge chair and a sketchy biography of actor Peter Falk, the book a series of mediocre anecdotes before a vaguely interesting section in which the actor collaborates with John Cassavetes.  Then, early evening: corellas, a million screaming ...

Under a hot heavy sky that sang low like a faraway siren I held the six-cylinder engine at just under two thousand revs. It would be a three-hour drive on a sultry Saturday morning with five occupants on board and a playlist of classical music and progressive rock. But the three hours would not be continuous. I like to break it up. We left just after nine. The road to Sydney was the usual snarl through the foothills of the Great Divide, those little mounds of earth that want to be mountains; the ones you look at and think 'I want to run up that hill and roll down again' as you ride past in your remembered childhood. I drove past one of them and left it circling like a slow dancer in the rear vision mirror, and turned off at the second Seymour exit. Then I pointed the car straight north and rolled into Shepparton an hour later.  We parked off the main street and walked around and looked for a place for a late breakfast or an early lunch. The older teenager pointed to a church co...

'I heard a horrible story about sensitivity readers, and a novel written by a middle-aged woman about middle-aged women. The women want to meet and talk about their problems with their husbands. They are going to go to a Chinese restaurant. One of them says: we probably shouldn’t go there, because of the MSG. And someone flagged that as racist — you can’t have that. So they made the writer move the scene to a coffee shop. I really don’t want to be a part of that.' Yet: 'I had dinner about two months ago with three millennial men in their mid-thirties. One was a socialist actor, two were tech bros, who had sold their company for a fick a lot of money. All three of them said they had never read a novel. I said, I don’t know what you mean. You’re all college graduates. How is that possible? Oh, yeah, they told me, we were assigned novels. We just did our essays from articles on the internet. We have never read a novel.' OK. Publishers are vetting novels via 'sensitivit...

Why all these different pasta shapes? I've cooked cylinders, squares, circles, items from nature (conchiglie, fiori, stellini, dinosaurs), automotive parts (ruote, rotelle, radiatori), human body parts (orecchiette, capellini, linguini), waiter's equipment (cavatappi), murder implements (strozzapreti) and animals (vermicelli, farfalle). It's about more than the taste of the pasta itself, although that is important. Greater significance attaches to how the shape carries its sauce or accompanying ingredients.  Such as the following recipe, which pairs cavatelli with smoked salmon pieces cut into a similar size and paired with sour cream and salty capers.  The recipe explains itself. It's merely an assembly job. Cook the cavatelli and toss in a little olive oil, slice the smoked salmon into pieces as described above and sear it for a few seconds in a non-stick pan and immediately toss through the pasta.  Top with sour cream and scatter capers over the lot. Chopped dill or ...

Melbourne songstress Renée Geyer, daughter of a Holocaust survivor, loved soul music so much she had the chutzpah to record James Brown’s 'It’s a Man’s Man’s World' on the tenth anniversary of its original release. Her voice was so soulful record company executives - intellectual giants that they are - recommended she release her US albums without her face on the cover, in order to hide her ethnicity. She subsequently -and sardonically - described herself in her autobiography as a 'white Hungarian Jew from Australia sounding like a 65-year-old black man from Alabama'. Geyer, who was only twenty when she recorded the James Brown soul classic , died this week of complications following surgery.  

Jeff Beck is all over the airwaves. My 12-year-old started humming For Your Love when it came on the radio last night.  Times change: at the same age, my experience thanks to a much narrower range of radio airplay stretched back only fifteen to twenty years. A child of 2023 humming 1960s tunes would be the equivalent of me at twelve being familiar with a 1900 top forty (based then on sheet music sales). On air currently : Off the Record; Neon Sunset at noon followed by Twang and Stolen Moments in turn. A music lover's feast on a burning hot Saturday afternoon.

 9.30 p.m. Wednesday evening. Port Philip Bay at Rye beach, looking north-east towards Mt Martha in the dying glow of the below-horizoned sun. Still 27 Celsius on the beach. * Photo: Tom Kennedy 

 And so we arrive at New Year's Day, crashing onto its smooth glistening shores like a fifteenth-century barque thrown from a savage 2022 sea onto some unknown and unexplored island off Venezuela. Except we have social media such as Twitter, of which the least said the better*. I'd prefer a quill and ink; or a talking parrot named Poll, a dog and a goat. And friendly natives. The twitter-sphere is not a friendly place: take it back five hundred years and it would be a world of cannibals. It is deadly quiet here; even the usual traffic snarl from Sydney Road is muted. I spent the morning pruning in the hot silent mid-morning sunshine. The Queen Elizabeths are ten feet of rioting pink; the two Peace climbers are competing for height; and Just Joey, Gold Bunny and the three Lorraine Lees are all happily flowering, although rust has badly affected some of them this summer - no wonder with the sodden 2023. John F. Kennedy has not yet taken off since being planted two years ago, and ...

Due to the time pressures of a high-powered career and various domestic pressures such as wife and children, I used to try to cook a meal in the shortest possible time. I wrote about it in a post entitled the  four-minute meal , a take on the four-minute mile. Heat was a mandatory factor, otherwise you could just eat cold pizza from the fridge. The following recipe is fast and easy but doesn't approach four minutes. You'll need at least ten. Just make sure the pasta goes on first, because everything else can be done within its cooking time. OK, pasta's on. Now peel and slice an onion and a garlic clove and put them in a pan with some olive oil on low heat. Slice some mushrooms, halve an avocado, remove the stone and slice and cross-hatch it. I do it in the skin and then carefully remove it.  Now slosh some white wine into the pan and check that the onion and garlic are softening, not burning. Now put in the mushrooms, lid the pan and turn up the heat slightly to soften th...

I stood in the mid-morning silence in filtered sunlight watering potted plants. I didn’t know their names then, but they were orchids, geraniums, begonias, monsteras, lace-delicate ferns, and succulents in long hanging strands that looked like pale green jewels. The pots sat on cascading terraced boards in a west-facing outbuilding that was latticed for semi-shade.  The outbuilding was at the back of the house next door to mine. I was ten. The owner of No. 55, an old lady by the name of Mrs. Snaith, was away on her annual summer holiday. She paid me each year to keep her plants alive for four weeks. There were hundreds. I climbed the fence each morning and entered the kind of quiet I had never found anywhere else. Me, the plants, the gentle hiss of the hose, and the drip-drip-drip of the hydrated pot plants onto the cold concrete below the terracing. No. 55 was utterly, achingly empty under the clear, cloudless early summer sky, and life - mine - was pregnant with its unknown futur...

Mid-ceremony: somewhere around the offertory. St Patrick's Cathedral choir was in full voice performing something by Palestrina. The congregation was silent, some possibly dozing. Five hundred year old polyphony does that to you. The dean (or the deacon, I never know which is which), wielding an incense burner, was smoking the altar like a beekeeper calming his bees, and the chains of the incense burner were singing a soft metallic rasp. He turned and swung the burner towards where we were sitting in the transept, and the indefinable aroma (perhaps the inside of a hundred-year-old cedar drawer used to store pipe tobacco in the library of a vicar who has given up smoking) of incense drifted across to greet our noses. Palestrina's unearthly syntactical perfection was progressing along a sonic line unbroken by any harsh melodic, and I was marvelling that it was probably the most sublime sound ever created by man, beast or machine. Then the siren went off. It was a discordant, hig...