What I cooked last night.

From today's paper : SHOPPERS baulking at the cost of beef are scrambling for eggs and stretching supplies. Customers have been confronted with depleted egg sections at some supermarkets. A notice advised eggs were in short supply "due to unexpected events in the industry". "People searching for cheaper alternative proteins are recognising the value of eggs," Egg Farmers Aus­tralia spokesman John Coward said. "A kilo of eggs is as low as $4. A kilo of popular steak is $20-$35. They can replace a beef dinner with a frittata." When it comes to "unexpected egg events", a frittata sounds a bit of a letdown compared to, for example, a 400g porterhouse, chargrilled to perfection, still pink in the middle and drowning in pepper sauce. The following is a much more robust alternative to the ubiquitous - and somewhat pretentious - frittata, if steak is off and eggs are on. Egg and bacon pie. Grease a glass or enamel pie dish and line it with a s...

I got off to a bad start with eggs. I was nineteen, out of home, and cooking for three. I started with an egg. (Another time I cooked five sausages by placing them into a red hot pan to which they fused. Ten minutes later I had ships of raw sausage meat decks over carbon holds.) I placed the egg in a saucepan and placed the saucepan on the stove and lit the stove. So far so good. Then I went into another room and did something else. I don't know, putting clothes away, reading the sports section, making a landline phone call. Could have been anything. Eight minutes later I came back into the kitchen. I sniffed the air. But it was too late. There was a sudden explosion, like a light globe being shot out. Something hit the ceiling. In fact, a lot of things hit the ceiling, and the upper parts of the walls. And they were all pale yellow. I had forgotten the water. The egg had heated up and exploded. It took me a day to clean the ceiling and I was still finding bits of egg a...

Roast potatoes are one of life's greatest benefits, especially when eaten hot straight from the oven having been baked with garlic and rosemary. Unfortunately, I sometimes bake too many and despite our best efforts, some remain uneaten. There are many ways to use them up. Pizza restaurants slice them onto pizzas and call them 'gourmet'. I call them leftovers. Beat half a dozen eggs and pour them into a non-stick pan over a low heat. Slice roast potatoes, grate a zucchini, slice a cooked chorizo sausage into thin rounds, cut some black olives into fine slices. Add these to omelette. Place lid over the pan if it has one, turn heat to lowest and let it cook through gently. If brave, make an attempt to fold this monster omelette, otherwise leave it as it is and call it a frittata. Slice into wedges and serve.

This morning, after toasting almost an entire loaf of white sliced bread and buttering and slicing them into one-inch 'soldiers', to accompany the children's lightly poached eggs, I gently upended the toaster (Tiffany, a Kmart housebrand) over the sink to remove the crumbs. (It also has a crumb tray, but the upending it gets more crumbs out than you find in the tray.) A week's worth of crumbs fell out. Three tiny screws, one tiny plastic bracket and two washers made of heatproof gasket material also fell out. Should I plug the toaster in and switch it on and see if it still works? The question crossed my mind fleetingly, like a nerve telling your brain to remove your hand from boiling water. I threw it in the rubbish. After all, it cost only as much a three full-priced loaves of Flinders sourdough. I'm off to Kmart. Or perhaps I should try one of those cut-price ones at Harris Scarfe. * Incidentally, poached eggs with toast batons is possibly the best...

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...

Omelettes? Who makes omelettes any more? I can't even spell them. I took three tries to get it right and I'm still not sure. Omelette? I haven't seen an omelette in years. My mother made one once with cheese in it. Mmmm. I'm warming to the idea. Forget the spelling. Take a cast iron pan. Oil it. Chop a leek finely into thin rings. Chop a red capsicum finely into equally thin albeit larger rings. Lightly beat half a cup of milk into four eggs. Add salt and pepper. Add three cummin seeds and a pinch of dried basil. Line the cast iron pan with the leek rings. Add the capsicum. Place the pan on the stove and turn on the heat to get the pan warming up. When it's almost hot pour over the eggs. Place a lid over the pan. Turn down the heat. Walk away. Come back in ten minutes. How it turns out depends on your pan and the heat and your technique. I placed a plate upside down over the pan, and flipped them over, and it came out cleanly, like a tarte tatin; the leek...

We're eating boats for dinner, boys, I told them. Sailing ships filled with cargo. I hope they don't sink. We fetched the boats from the pantry. They were large pasta shells about two inches from bow to stern. They were 24 of them. I boiled them and drained them and put them in cold water. To fill them, we needed 500g spinach, 500g fresh ricotta, 100g mozzarella, 50g parmesan, two eggs, a good dash of nutmeg and three cloves of garlic. I melted the spinach: took a bunch of it, rinsed it, placed it in a pan with the water it held after rinsing, threw in a dash of olive oil and a scored clove of garlic, put the lid on the pan and heated the spinach slowly until it turned to green mush. Then I mixed the spinach with the ingredients in the third paragraph in a large bowl along with a gust of salt and a gale of pepper. Then we loaded up the boats to their upper foredecks. That was fun, especially for the boys. There was ricotta mixture on the ceiling. How did that get there...