What I Cooked Last Night

British music journalist David Hepworth considered 1971 the most significant in rock music, calling it ' ... the most febrile and creative time in the entire history of popular music'. Puffery, of course, but that was the publisher’s jacket copy. (By comparison, Andrew Grant Jackson’s 1973: Rock at the Crossroads  could be read both as an alternative ‘greatest year’ or as confirmation of pop music’s decline.) Either way, 1971: Never a Dull Moment  exhumed a year awash with towering names producing so much great music the charts literally couldn't accommodate it all: The Doors' LA Woman , Van Morrison's  Tupelo Honey, The Faces'  Every Picture Tells a Story ;   albums by T-Rex, Black Sabbath, The Who, George Harrison, Pink Floyd, Isaac Hayes, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Marvin Gaye, Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell and more, obviously .  A teenager forging a dark and ragged pathway through life guided by such musical signposts could not help but be perplexed b...

August 19 is - was - National Potato Day. While the last thing the world needs is another National ‘Day’/‘Week’/‘Year’ of something or other, that particular recognition of the potato was at least just an industry marketing ploy: few would be aware of it apart from a muster of farmers from Colbinabbin, Terang, or the Adelaide Plains at an industry conference in some regional convention centre where they talk Russett Burbank and Sebago and Dutch Cream by day and get drunk in the evening. Conversely, the United Nations takes a much more serious approach, marking its own International Day of the Potato in May: its webpage, virtually anthropomorphising the innocent tuber, features such arrestingly appetising gerund-led (of course) headlines as ‘harvesting diversity, feeding hope’ . The UN’s ‘diversity’ invocation is not a plea for greater culinary variety - that would be far too mundane for the bureaucrats in New York, Geneva or Vienna. Leave that to the servant-class chefs. But let's ...

An end-of-winter dinner when spinach is plentiful and cheap. Olive oil and cream tame the rustic earthiness of the green leaves into a silky voluptuous pasta dish for spring. Yes, it’s still more than a week away but the sky can’t help telling the story. Sauté a medium chopped onion, a leek chopped into thin rounds, a chopped garlic clove and a red capsicum chopped into fine strips in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. In another pot, wilt a bunch of spinach, washed - but not spun, so the leaves retain some water - and chopped roughly, in some more olive oil. Turn with a wooden spoon occasionally and add plenty of salt and pepper. Remove from heat immediately the leaves have collapsed. * In the west, those winter evening skies have all but gone. The show is over: the dramatic severe blood-orange stains marked with patches of black, like Turner paint storms, are now transforming into paling blue-white spring ambitions, hanging on for longer, fingers of light grasping for summer. * Me...

She had left a hand-written note on the kitchen table. Inscribed on a paper napkin, cream, one of the more robust ones, embossed, that you could put around at a dinner party. ‘Dear family ….’ Cursive handwriting. Baroque Ks and Ms and Ts, all curlicues and loops and tails like little wedding dress trains.  ‘Going on bus to Llandysil …’ Telegram style. You never lose it. The style disappeared after the telegram’s demise; returned for the SMS and text. No-one had to relearn it, it just reappeared, with a few acronyms and affectations.  ‘ … to visit Laurie. He must be lonely.’ It was signed off with another heavily curlicued three-letter word: ‘Mum’. The curlicues probably haven’t changed much since the 1960s; maybe just a little flatter and slightly out of line. Visiting Laurie would be difficult. He has been dead 32 years and two months. He no longer resides at Llandisyl, the nursing home, which in any case fell to the wrecker’s ball, or whatever they demolish with these days, ...

 Mistakes follow me everywhere. They jump out at me like angry lions. * Centreway Steakhouse. 28 Centreway, East Keilor. Probably one of the best butchers in the north-west.

I was in the front row at a packed Nova cinema in Carlton with my younger teenage son for its ‘retrospective’ screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey . Kubrick’s 1968 film is in favour with arthouse buffs, despite original critics variously labelling the 149-minute epic as unintelligible, lacking plot, and being too long. Well, the film does encompass a timeline of four million years. How short do you want it to be? The front row was otherwise empty. Don’t people like being close? Or is a cinema screen an overpowering phenomenon for a generation attuned to watching a tiny device twelve inches from its face?  The front row has always been my choice since the legendary Doug Ling, RMIT film lecturer, enlightened me to its virtues: complete absorption in the film, no interruption to peripheral vision, near deafness, and plenty of legroom. I might add that during the more transcendental films the sweet redolence of something approximating incense also emanated from somewhere near the front o...

Seen on the back of a cake mix packet: Warning: Do Not Eat Unbaked Batter . Goodbye, innocent childhood pleasure.

The plant had outlasted summer. It didn’t sicken and grow spindly and yellow like the others, but retained its healthy greenness and even seemed to grow, although that might have been illusory. It was situated in the spot that gets the most sun; moreover, no tomato vine has been planted there in the almost twenty years we have had this house, although whether that theory (don't plant tomatoes twice in the same spot) holds water, who knows.  Every year, I rip them out automatically, harvest and let the green fruit ripen in cardboard boxes. This year I left the healthy one in the ground, and it continued to produce bunches of green-yellow orbs. And I kept harvesting them and ripening them and using them. And now it is mid-winter and I have seasonal tomatoes. Climate change, everyone says. Maybe. I don't know. Persian fetta and fresh tomatoes with fettuccine.   No apologies for this flagrantly summerish dish in the depths of winter; after all, I make stews and brisket and la...

I drove to the back blocks of Thomastown to get a book on philosophy: don’t laugh. It was a VCE text for Tom and the academic book store is essentially a factory outlet on the northern basalt plain where hulking grey warehouses line the streets like monstrous black windowless mansions. The location keeps the prices down but I still walked away with $72 worth of Nietzsche. It was about midday. This being the winter solstice, the buildings on the north side of the street were in deep shadow but, on the south side, the glassed entrance to Campion was flooded with angled sun. I rang the bell. The place was empty except for an enticing aroma of cooking food. A woman came out and apologised and said she had just put her lunch in the microwave. On the contrary, I said, sorry for interrupting. She disappeared into the warehouse to fetch the book and when she came back I asked if she would take cash as my bank account had been hacked, and I was still waiting for a new card. She put the book in ...

That afternoon at Heide we wandered around the grounds that were once a farm. Inside the modernist house the limestone walls glowed pale pink, butter yellow or deep orange depending on their orientation to the low winter sun. The 1967 house, now a sparse gallery, was built when bohemians John and Sunday Reed outgrew the old farmhouse, now known as Heide Cottage, thirty yards up the hill and obscured behind rambling garden beds and some ancient spreading trees. Almost sixty years later the design brief for the building has been fulfilled: that it should ‘... have a sense of mystery and weather over time to take on the appearance of a ruin in a landscape’. Indeed, it now recalls the white walls of Eucla's abandoned telegraph station. At age ten I had visited a similar house at the edge of a forest, disappearing with the occupants’ children into the trees; and the clean-lined modernist building seen from the distance was a low white cave radiating soft yellow light in a dusky steel sk...

First came the aroma, a kind of steamy spiciness, like woks in an Asian market. Then a plate appeared. On it was an explosion of glistening red barbecued pork erupting out of a bread roll containing a sea of coriander, sliced cucumber, pieces of dynamite chili and shredded carrot. It was a cold early autumn day under a steel grey sky heavy with cloud. We had been driving: what they used to call a day trip. East out of the city, and an early  lunch stop; a shopping square off the main highway. Selected at random. More plates arrived. Barbecue pork banh mi. Roast pork banh mi. Pork crackling banh mi. Roast chicken banh mi. The place was a hybrid cafe bakery: laminex tables with chairs that shriek when you pushed them back, help-yourself refrigerators, those straw cylinders on the counter where you pull one and two others fall out. The front was all glass, framing the looming mountains above the shopping square.  Iced coffee Vietnamese-style: a cold tawny caffeine blast designed ...

Some years ago I put a hedge of rosemary where some old geraniums had been, in a narrow garden strip under the north-facing front window bordering the path to the front door. Now, fully grown, its pine forest-blue-green needled stems tap at the windows; and, if you brush your hand against it as you pass, leaves an aromatic earthy perfume you seem to be able to detect all day. On a more practical level, rosemary adds an immense flavour and aroma boost to meat dishes, particularly gelatinous stews from cuts such as lamb shank. I made the recipe below the other night, the coldest this year; a night when the pain of almost-molten sand underfoot goes from recent memory - just a few weeks ago on Point Leo beach - into some cerebral receptor vault: another summer dies (although it was already autumn). And they are finite. Tick, tick. * I browned salted and peppered four lamb shanks in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a pan and then transferred them to a baking dish. In the same pan, I ...

The new freeway skirting Geelong (pop. 250,000) is an arc so perfect it is almost artificial, half-circling the city like a whining Electrolux floor polisher wielded by a 1950s frocked housewife on linoleum, pink roses rampant.  New? The bypass has probably been there fifteen years, but I don’t come down this way much any more. In the early 1970s my family purchased a slightly down-at-heel ex-farmhouse in Birregurra, a small farming town in the western district. Geelong was the halfway point, and the road faltered through the city’s endless stoplights, over a railway bridge under which old diesels slept in glittering rail dust, past industries and factories and a cement works and the Ford engine plant and a greyhound track and the fourth-division soccer fields and a water park. Once past Geelong, the journey's second half had been easy, like a long gradual landing in a light aircraft on a gigantic flat green field. The house was a rambling - and possibly even slightly crumbling - t...

The neighbours left a large bag of apples they had harvested in the wicker chair on our front porch one hot day in late summer. A text message said they’d be away for a few days, and we might also collect some cherry tomatoes from their garden before they became overripe.  I opened their big gate and walked into a kind of eclectic sub-tropical Japanese-style garden in which flowering vines trailed over brick walls, freakishly tall sunflowers towered out of raised garden beds, and hundreds of cherry tomatoes sprawled; their vines winding through and around other plants rather than being lashed to their uprights like crucified lawyers. Amid this psychedelic jungle sat a red-beamed gazebo topped bizarrely but satisfyingly by a Danish maritime flag. The apple tree was somewhere behind all this eclecticism. The place seemed to have its own atmosphere, if not its own climate.  The neighbours sit out here at night under coloured lights listening to Shankar and watching parti-coloured...