What I Cooked Last Night

She rang me late; it must have been 9.30 or 10 o'clock. He was coming up the drive, she said. She had heard all the familiar noises, she told me; the big side gate that was built in the late 1960s, steel and cyclone mesh, to keep children in and wandering dogs out. It groaned with its sheer weight when anyone opened it. She had heard it just like that day in 1968 when my father had to stop and get out of his cerulean blue Holden Belmont and open it before continuing up the drive; and these noises of gate dragging and car purring and soft coming-home voices had made her call me because he hadn't come into the house and his dinner was ready, and he hadn't acted out those familiar little rites that no-one notices until they are gone: coat, warm, smelling of Melbourne autumn and coffee-dense cafés, and hung on the back of the chair; Melbourne Herald, a reasonably respectable broadsheet, folded rustling onto the table like a placemat you could read, which in my father's case...

Twenty years and twelve days ago I started writing recipes into an online diary. It was easier than my earlier habit of writing on bits of old paper or on the backs of used envelopes which were then filed inside cookbooks in no particular order. My new online system eliminated the need to find notebooks or paper, or pens for that matter. As a professional writer, I was always running out of these things thanks to my habit of scribbling random thoughts on any white space I could find. Since that time twenty years and twelve days ago, I have accrued (if that is an appropriate word) three more children; seen one close relative turn from straight to gay, another from gay to straight, and a third from female to male; lost several aunts and uncles signalling the closure of my father's generation; watched a frail, ailing 75-year-old very close relative on thirty pills a day into a frail, ailing 95-year-old on thirty pills a day; fostered fifty greyhounds and adopted a couple; owned ten ca...

Tom and I walked down from the beach house on the hill, and along Canterbury Jetty Road towards the ocean, and then branched off where the walking path follows the shoreline. Here, the wild broken cliffs of the beach itself are obscured behind impassable dense bush and steep sand dunes, and at night you can hear the groaning ocean roar as it smashes itself against the rocks.  As usual we were talking about music as we went in single file along the overgrown path, the occasional bird flitting startled from the overhang. Fifty years ago a record hit the charts, progressive rock it was called, and it was good and it was on high rotation in that year that the genre reached its zenith. Putatively. The record was Yes’s Rick Wakeman who, solo, had released The Six Wives of Henry VIII; and once again time was standing still, I being precisely Tom’s age then as he is now. I played it over and over on cassette, taped directly off AM radio; Tom has the actual record - yes the original 1973 vi...

All of that fourth form year I sat in the back row, left side; the quiet corner, equidistant from the exit door at back right of the room and the teacher on the platform at the front. Classrooms were large in those days; more like lecture theatres. I used to smuggle in a cassette player and regale nearby students with early 1970s progressive rock. My deskmate Robert was a Bob Dylan fan and owned Dylan's entire opus. (We had only one Dylan record in the house - my older university student sister's copy of Nashville Skyline. One day my mother - of seven children - burst into the living room where I was innocently playing the album to shriek at me that the lyrics of Lay Lady Lay were not acceptable. I was of course lost for words. It's just a song, I thought.) As well as a complete Dylan collection, Robert also owned a whippet, an Indian runner duck and a ferret; and he had a sister, Janice, who was a year older. I did not care about the duck, the dog or the ferret. During the...

It was just an ordinary beef stew; nothing to write home about. I used oyster blade, the cut in which the layer of gelatinous membrane spliced between two layers of muscle, like a gold vein in quartz, melts under long slow cooking and bastes - or more accurately lubricates - the cut until the fibres break down. I sliced the meat into large cubes the size of matchboxes, dusted it in flour and salt and pepper, and sealed it in olive oil before tossing it into a casserole with a cup of chopped onions, half a cup of diced bacon, some whole button mushrooms, rounds of carrot, chopped parsley, a cup of red wine and stock to cover.  These days I do all this mechanically; that autopilot function that allows humans to think about something entirely different to what they are doing. Like having two brains. Maybe that's the secret to evolution. I was thinking along those lines and also listening to 'Into the Mystic' and 'And It Stoned Me' among other tracks, and suddenly it hi...

In the early years of the century weblog writers circulated amongst themselves what were known as ‘memes’ - essentially questionnaires or surveys on various subjects, the following of which concerned books. The questions and my answers, posted on one an early weblog, were as follows: How many books do you own? Far too many. Hundreds. maybe thousands. They lurk, they shuffle, they sit on dark shelves silently and laugh on open shelves out loud. They reside in boxes stuffed away in back rooms. They probably dance with each other at night, covers akimbo, leaves all a-splay. They come out occasionally to be read. Most times, they are on their best behaviour. I love them. But sometimes I threaten to sell them when their stories become too loud, too raucous, like ghosts of the past having a party. They stop immediately, but I think they do not take me seriously and start regaling each other once again when I am asleep. You can't have too many books. The problem is the more you read, the ...

Some 'journalists' quotes are exquisitely revealing: “During any breaking news event we report what we know as we learn it.” (New York Times spokesman quoted in the Wall Street Journal and republished in The Australian, 23 October, on the Gaza hospital explosion.) Reporters ‘learn’? Not ‘investigate’ and ‘verify’? No, the NYT robot is on another journalistic planet; the one on which news capture and confirmation osmotically bypasses his abilities. He is a typing frog incapable of a leap. In fact, he budges not an inch from the lily pad: “And as the facts on the ground become more clear, we continue reporting.” Or, translated, ‘the truth, if there is one, doesn’t matter, we can fix it later’. Lazy ‘journalism’ like this will kill newspapers far quicker than any internet. The real problem for the 'journalist' is that since the reader has surpassed his level of intelligence he (the reader) regards the organ for which the journalist 'writes' as not worthy of his att...

It's the weather. The roses are on fire, breaking out everywhere. Pick them madly, I always told the children who were hesitant, as if cutting off such perfection in nature were vandalism. For every rose you put in a vase, or of whose petals you scatter on the grass, I told them, two more will flower. Or four. Or six. Yes, counter-intuitive. Since she was tall enough to reach the blooms Alex spent untold languid summer afternoons launching with five ever-growing fingers rose petals around the garden or on peoples’ heads. This year I spent winter finding sites in the garden for roses where they didn't exist (sites not roses) making instant rationalisations for suitability, even though they may not have been. The winter bare-rooted rose type is surely the greatest bargain in the plant world; a nascent creation that should last a lifetime, stretching itself languorously upward against a wall, peering across a fence, or peeping around a corner of a house while issuing impossibly be...

Some philosopher, or it might have been a scientist or a chef, said that the sense of smell elicits the strongest memories. You can't hear, taste, see, or touch it; so it must be true. The others are only recognition; each smell must be a sensation in the brain that is implanted the first time and simply gets poked, like a cow prod. Don’t ask me. The smell, which was a blend of new hessian, 1950s chemical plant, glue factory and artist's studio, was a brand new roll of linoleum that was being installed in the kitchen of the house in which I lived. I was close to the source of the aroma because I had not yet reached the mirror-like leading edge strip of 18/80 stainless steel that edged the kitchen sink and side drainers. I had to pull myself up to look into it and see two green eyes. The lino, once the installers had gone off in their Maples truck, looked to me like tracks. It was a linear geometric design; grey strips alternating with thinner black strips with alternate red and...

Once Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard is incredulous: “I never thought we would crumple to this … people chanting these things … (‘gas the Jews’ … etc) … is a catastrophic descent from civility that I thought I’d never see. … If you’re a law-abiding Jewish person in Sydney who wanted to go along to the Opera House ( … lit up in blue and white … ) and told you had to stay at home … what is this?” (Headline of editorial in The Australian, 11 October 2023: ‘Sydney’s Night of Shame … ’)

News report: Sydney, 10 October: ‘ … a man was dragged away by police as he held what appeared to be an Israeli flag … (he was ) removed by multiple (sic) officers and threatened with arrest.’  No link necessary - it’s all over the web. NSW police ‘assistant commissioner’ in charge of this - Tony Cooke - has a history of Orwellian behaviour . Cooke went on, referring to neither side, “This is New South Wales. We do not expect people to bring conflict from other places to the streets of Sydney.” Expect? How about ‘allow’? Yet: ‘Cooke said police had allowed the rally to proceed.’

Yes, not new. But good, even if only once every seven years. It's probably been longer. The cold weather had returned with a vengeance, earlier having been spurned by the kind of spring warmth we haven’t seen for something like seven years. That Nino thing or whatever it’s called. Let’s hope it stays away permanently.  Either way, the chilly blast called for homely, filling fare. This time I did the corned beef thing in the oven. A fist-sized knob of corned beef, chopped into small dice (apparently you are meant to 'pull' it - some kind of bizarre American expression) was turned into a large bowl of boiled and semi-mashed potato along with a tablespoonful each of mild English mustard and butter, and folded through with two eggs, a handful of finely chopped parsley and a dash of salt and pepper. This mess was placed into a casserole dish and topped with more butter and a thatch of grated cheddar cheese, and baked until bubbling. Serve with steamed green vegetables; green bea...

They had told me over the phone in July that our next foster dog’s name was Zorro, but when his papers arrived it was spelt Zoro. I didn’t know whether the name was a misspelling of pulp writer Johnston McCulley’s fictional character, or an obscure reference to Zoroastrianism. I liked the latter as Zoro (the dog) was a cool, calm, peaceful creature; although when he arrived here in July there had been a scar on the crown of his head which, with a little imaginative typographical realignment, could conceivably have been a ‘Z’. Zoro/Zorro stayed for the regulation four weeks, and was the initiator (via his presence; he didn't contribute) of a philosophical discussion about greyhounds and their role in modern society. These random debaters are confused about many things but completely uninformed on most; least of all the animal relationship theories of Kant et al, so that any discussion becomes bogged down in cliché and parroted second-hand opinion. Zoro/Zorro returned to Tullamarine...

I posted something like this years ago; way back in the early years of this weblog, pre-pandemic, before children, ante-GFC. A long time ago. I could use the search button, but where’s the romance? There are more complicated and crowded recipes along these lines about the web; but some contain too many ingredients. To illustrate the point, one of the most rustic pasta dishes adds only garlic, oil, parsley and a dusting of grated cheese; but when you’re hungry, there is nothing better. And note: only one ingredient actually gets cooked in this recipe. Standard spaghetti works well, or you could use angel hair, or any other long pasta. Without wanting to be coarse, the slurpiness of long pasta assists in the uptake of the flavour when the sauce is minimal. I don't know why; ask a food technician or a chef. I’m neither. Chop a small handful of semi-dried tomatoes into slivers; likewise with half the volume of anchovies, and half again of birdseye chillies. The idea is to fascinate the...