What I cooked last night.

Prawns used to be a luxury food. They were expensive. But people historically did dreadful things with them and wasted their money. One of the things they did was to take a perfectly good martini glass, put diced tomato in it, drown it with thousand island dressing and then hang a prawn on the side of the glass like a seahorse trying escape a fishbowl. Another thing was to truss prawns up in bacon, pierce them with a toothpick and then grill them, like a mass burning of medieval martyrs. They called them angels on horseback. Or was it devils on horseback? No. Devils on horseback had prunes inside. Can you imagine that? I used to serve them when I was a young waiter at AHA functions back in the days when the AHA had the state government in its pocket. But that's another story. Silver trays of blistered and glistening black bacon rolls smelling of the sea. Why would you do that when you could just as easily gently cook prawns in white wine and garlic, remove the prawns when ju...

Some spelling errors, typos, literals – call them what you like – mess with your mind. I once ordered 'parched eggs' in a cafe knowing full well what they were. The other day I saw a sign in a deli that said: 'mindless bacon, $15.99 a kilo'. M is nowhere near R on a keyboard so who knows how that one occurred? I was buying bacon to make an old recipe that the children have come to adopt as one of their favourites. One out of three of the children on a moderate day - and two out of three one a finicky day - will not eat eggs; while the third – who does eat eggs – will only eat the yolk. Yet all three will slurp up spaghetti carbonara. Hide the eggs in something else! (Perhaps we also should bring back the 1960s egg flip: to a litre of creamy milk in a blender, add two tablespoons of sugar, two eggs, and a dash of vanilla essence. Blend. Pour the delicious bubbling unctuous fluid into tall glasses and top with nutmeg. Retro flavour explosion! I want one now. They w...

... mixed with aroma of brewing coffee at dawn before the traffic has started and the world is still quiet ... when you were ten and your mother took the pie out of the oven and cut it at the table and steam curled in the air and the aroma of baked egg and bacon and pastry was like something you had never smelled before ... in a takeaway when you are as hungry as a tiger and the sandwich hand slips your freshly toasted $5 bacon and egg sandwich (extra butter on top) into a brown paper bag and you sit in the park and pull out your newspaper and tear open the paper bag that is now partially translucent ... when it is cooked so long in the pan it crumbles into deep red shards of salty crunchiness, because that's how you like it best ... on the fish shop grill when George the Greek throws it down next to the meat pattie and the onions and the egg and he drags the bacon around to turbo-charge the heat and it sizzles and pops and then he builds your burger ... when it comes ou...