What I cooked last night.

Like barley, brown rice used to have a reputation. Barley was once regarded as the ingredient grandmothers added to soups and lamb stews to fortify growing children. Then someone on television turned barley into a risotto, and packets of McKenzie's Pearl Barley starting flying off the lower supermarket shelves, where they had lain untouched for decades next to McKenzie's Soup Mix, McKenzie's Yellow Split Peas, McKenzie's Dessicated Coconut and, of course, McKenzie's Bi-Carb Soda. Barley was now a foodie's food. Brown rice was once similarly unloved. It was like barley for 1970s hippies, having been associated with that demographic together with several types of smoke and a kind of footwear. Being brown was kind of appropriate because everything in the 1970s was brown: curtains, Datsun 120Ys, carpet, dinner sets, corduroy, record covers , you name it. Even the timber bowls that brown rice salad was typically served in were brown. Well, of course. And the r...

Subtitled: The Hunt For Red Cabbage in October. * Why are menu descriptions in restaurants so long and pretentious? Because it helps them sell the meal. A restaurant menu would never offer 'cabbage risotto' because no one would order it, would they? Of course not. It doesn't sound very nice. But it is. Risotto with leek and red cabbage. Finely chop an onion and a couple of inches of leek, and score two cloves of garlic**. Saute these in a generous amount of olive oil until just soft. Pour in a cupful of Arborio rice. Stir the rice to coat in oil. Pour in half a cup of white wine. Then add enough boiling stock to cover the rice. Stir to stop the rice sticking. If you turn down the heat low enough, you can leave it for a while; but remarkably, many stoves can't go down beyond a certain temperature. I used to have an electric stove and found it perfect, but most people don't like them. Finely slice a couple of red cabbage leaves. Add. They will give off the...

You might be safer eating the wrapper. Or is this just one of those beaten-up food scares the press loves so much? Arsenic in chicken is also afoot , so expect a raft of plays in which elderly spinsters dish up braised chicken on rice to their lodgers instead of pouring laced elderberry wine ...

This is the kind of thing that is ridiculed by the purists and loved by everyone else. I walked half a mile to the dusty Foodworks supermarket in the small country town that the river winds through - or should I say the town built around several bends in the river - and bought a tin of cream of chicken soup, a packet of grated parmesan cheese and some fresh button mushrooms. From its wine shop annex, I bought a bottle of Deakin Estate chardonnay. Then back to the river. I set some water to boil over the flame and, in a pan on a cooler part of the fire, I warmed some arborio rice in olive oil. When  the water bubbled I carefully and gradually poured some into the rice, interspersing it with white wine. I opened the tin of cream of chicken soup and folded the contents through the simmering rice, once again gradually. Its aroma was so good I was tempted to eat some of the salty, chickeny ooze straight out of the can. (I actually did this as a child - canned soup concentrate is del...

Risotto doesn’t usually figure in the quick and easy recipe pantheon, but it is a frequent solution here. Preparation is minimal, and it lets you do other things while you are cooking; such as opening the mail, reading, drinking, getting changed ... you get the idea. Here’s my risotto timeline when I get home late, but still want to eat well without having to stand at the stove or preparation board for very long: Risotto with zucchini and chorizo. 1. Walk in from the cold. Place keys and wallet on fridge. Fill kettle and turn it on. Peel and chop one onion. Peel and score one garlic clove. Toss both into a pot with glug of olive oil. Light stove. Elapsed time, 1 minute 20 seconds. 2. Place one chicken stock cube (I use Massel) into glass jug. Fill with boiled water. Stir. Pour rice into warm oil in pot. Stir. Elapsed time, 4 minutes. 3. Take bottle of white wine from fridge, tip a good glugful into rice, stir. Elapsed time, 4 minutes 30 seconds. 4. Pour stock into rice. St...

If, like me, you always cook too much rice, don't throw it out. Make a cold rice salad to eat as a side dish in this steamy, hot, stormy weather. Take three cups of leftover basmati rice, one can lentils (drained), half a red onion (diced), juice of one lemon. Combine. Chill. Simple but good. * In the garden, the cos lettuce (plural) have their hands up. "Pick me!" they could be saying. I'll pick them but we might retire the cos next season. Caesar salad must have been invented to use up cos lettuce, because it doesn't seem good for much else. Perhaps I've just had too much, like Peter (or was it Benjamin?) who had to be given chamomile. Any recipes for cos that don't dress it up in bacon and egg? * I came home to find Tracy smashing the crockery. Beautiful old plates, all in shards. "What are you doing?" I asked, redundantly. She grasped the redundancy adroitly and returned: "What does it look like I'm doing, playing t...

In a pan, soften two very finely chopped onions in oil. Add some ghee for a richer flavour. Place a dozen cashews, one large can of coconut cream, a teaspoon of chili, a knob of peeled and chopped ginger the size of your thumb, a large clove of garlic (or two small), half a teaspoon each of cinnamon and garam masala, two cardamom pods and a couple of rays of star anise (optional) into a food processor. Hit ‘turbo’. Watch as the colours homogenise. Listen as the initial nut grind goes into a high-pitched turbine-smooth whizz. Twenty seconds and you will have a pinkish beige sludge flecked with small pieces of cashew. The aroma will make you want to spoon it out of the processor and eat it now. Steep a couple of tablespoons of raisins in hot water to which you have added a teaspoon of turmeric. Remove half of the onion from the pan, reserve. Transfer cashew and coconut cream mixture to the pan. Drain the raisins and add. Stir and cook very gently for ten minutes. Add a little wate...

The sun is warm but it comes later in the morning and goes earlier at night. Time moves on. The seasons pass. Children grow. The baby cut a tooth yesterday. William is a schoolboy. Thomas misses him. They were inseparable. Have I ever taken a photo of one without the other half in shot? Thomas learned to swim this summer, had the confidence to climb the diving board at Coburg, dove off in a kind of flat fall, swam to the other side, climbed out. He wore yellow swimmers and yellow flippers and looked like a fat duck. William, not confident enough to dive, called instructions from the side. Some curious children gathered to watch this small muscly boy diving. ‘Who taught you to dive?’ they called. ‘Him,’ lied Thomas, pointing to William; and stood on the end of the board, rocking gently up and down, toes on the edge, arms outstretched, waiting. ‘Tell me when, Winnie,’ he called. The pet name remains from when he could not pronounce the name at twelve months. William paused, then shoute...

There comes a time when a spice jar gets so old you keep it anyway, for curiosity value. I have a nutmeg jar, nearly empty, that has ounce weight on the label. That makes it pre-1972, when we changed to decimals, much of which nobody understands. How tall is a 165cm gangster? Beats me. The nutmeg jar is a nice imitation cut glass design with a silver and blue label and a red Hoyts logo. Since spice jar use-by dates give you a few years, someone must have bought the jar in the late 1960s, possibly when Hey Jude was topping the charts. How did it come to be in my kitchen? No idea. Picked it up somewhere. Probably borrowed it from my mother's kitchen years ago. Spicy barbecued chicken. One tablespoon each chili and coriander powder One teaspoon each turmeric, fenugreek leaves, peppercorns, and salt 5 green cardomom pods 1 black cardomom pod 1 piece star anise 2 cloves garlic 1 inch peeled ginger 1 inch cinnamon 1 clove 1 pinch asafoetida 1 grate of nutmeg One half-teas...

The zucchini is one of my favourite vegetables, except that it's a fruit. (Oh, not that debate again.) Not only are they fruit, but they also have a different name depending where you are in the world. In some places they are summer squash, while in others they are courgettes. I once had something like this fractured conversation with someone who misheard, asking "Did you say Corvettes?" Nice. They grow fast. Shame they're not red, because then you'd have little red courgettes. I like the little white ones best. They're called white, but they are pale mottled green. Their flesh is delicate and they are good sliced and boiled with chopped onion and a little butter and a dash of nutmeg and salt and pepper. In the following recipe they support sardines in a dish which combines the characteristic strong flavour of the fish with the warm earthiness of the rice-filled zucchini, accentuated with the tang of lemon juice. Kind of Sicilian, I suppose. Stuffed zucch...

My mother-in-law was here for dinner. She had read the boys about a hundred books, and they were in bed if not asleep, and I made her a gin and tonic with a slice of lemon from the tree. I roasted a red pepper. This was going to be good. It ought to be at $10 a kilogram. Vegetable prices are snaking upwards again, along with water, mortgage rates, council rates, fuel, kindergarten fees, electricity and gas, the latter two receiving a further upward boost thanks to Kevin Rudd’s mining tax that he stole from the thesis of two American academics. All those actors’ bright ideas at the 2008 thinkfest and he steals one from two academics in America. The odds are shortening about Kevin Rudd being jettisoned before the election, and we have a Prime Minister named Julia. I peeled the pepper and set it aside, and put a finely chopped onion and a scored clove of garlic into a large warm pan in which a knob of butter was curling around as it melted, like a daydreaming figure skater. I let the ...

It’s easy to be superior about food. Take those jars of supermarket gloop for example. You could regard them as nasty confections of lurid colours, chemicals, preservatives, salts and gelatinous gums. Because that’s what they are. No-one can argue. Instant sanctimony! Chicken Tonight comes to mind, as does Kan-Tong fluorescent sweet and sour sauce, which resembles the kind of glue my children use to stick sections of egg carton, painted noodles and glitter onto large sheets of butcher’s paper at kindergarten. (Perhaps, by contrast, I should make pasta alfredo with Clag instead of Maggi dried alfredo powder one night. A few glasses of chardonnay beforehand and I shouldn’t even notice the difference.) They wouldn’t make products like these if people didn’t buy them, the good angel on my right shoulder whispers. The market drives demand. But if they didn’t make it, people wouldn’t be able to buy it, replies the bad angel on my left shoulder. Begone, bad angel with your nanny state thin...

Late Saturday morning, warm and overcast. I drove out to pick up Tracy from her walk along the cool path that runs between the ti-tree and the beach and came home with a single bed, two Parker pens, four tennis balls and six books, including Bolte: A Political Biography and The New Yorker Book of Lawyer Cartoons . On the way back we had stopped at a garage sale (William calls them garbage sales: four-year-old unintentional wit) but this one was good. I almost bought the Pentax SLR camera, perfect condition with original hand-case, box and instruction book, $5; but my hands were full. Someone else could have it. The bed, in excellent condition, is for Thomas. It’s a very beach-housey bed, of the type they used to call bedsteads, with polished walnut head and base connected by large iron interlocks to the timber-framed wire mattress support. We slept in these as children. They used to sag with use, especially when we jumped up and down on them, but this one is perfectly flat. * Sund...

I can remember, but only just, those distant days of long ago when earlier civilisations - oblivious to the coming of a whole brave-new-world raft of hybrid, clichéd acronyms and abbreviations that were destined to stride the world’s consciousness like a tech-savvy hyper-eco-warrior driving a Toyota Prius to the airport to catch a Jumbo jet to an ETS and CPRS global warming conference on the other side of the world - walked to the Chinese takeaway on the corner and fetched fried rice in pots . Yes. You took a vessel - a large saucepan was commonly used due to its utility in both fetching and serving, also it had a lid - to the Chinese takeaway and returned home with it full of steaming freshly-wokked fried rice, fragrant with spices and soy and slivers of peppery scrambled egg and cubes of salty ham and tiny piquant prawns and fat hot green peas that popped in your mouth like fuschias pressed between a finger and thumb. The ever-smiling Chinese takeaway man – or lady – would decide a...

Thomas tried to spoon some of my tea over a bowl of freshly cooked rice, telling me it tastes delicious. There is no Japanese blood in my family. As far as I know. *I saw the movie years ago in Cinema Studies 1 at RMIT's old Radio Theatre in Bowen Lane (probably my favourite cinema ever) and while I can't remember the plot, I've never forgotten the name.

After the calm of the previous week, the ancient wind got up and blew for days; as it has each year for millennia, when Spring heats up the great red centre and the vast desert prepares for its sixty millionth hot season. A buffeting kind of wind, dropping to dead silence one minute and roaring like a dragon the next, rattling every sash window in the house. Trying to blow it away as if the house never belonged there anyway. The wind can smash a low building yet a hundred-year-old eucalypt with untold weight in its sixty-foot canopy rarely sustains damage more than the odd dropped limb. The evolution of trees. * Nothing of note in the kitchen lately. Sometimes, great lumps of time seem to roll by heavily, like unevenly round rocks rumbling away. One minute it’s early afternoon on a Tuesday; then you look up and three weeks have fallen off the calendar into the abyss. Twenty-one ‘x’s and nothing to show. Times like this, cooking and eating take on a strictly routine and practical ...

Two days of winter warmth. A north-easterly off the alps in the morning, picking up some warmth after midday; perhaps turning slightly westerly and dragging in some heat off the flat floor of 10 million acres of Mallee desert. Too early to be thinking about spring. But buds are forming on the trees. The pruned roses are starting to shoot. And this evening, did I notice the light seemed to hesitate before failing? * The papers - all media - have been full of moon landing nostalgia, dutifully pointing out that it was 21 July 1969 here and 20 July 1969 elsewhere, and even releasing 'previously unreleased footage', like new Beatles songs or an extra reel of The Godfather . I don't remember this degree of coverage on the tenth, twentieth or thirtieth anniversaries. Maybe they're just warming up for the half-century. * Rice again. This time, another winter favourite that is more a lunch thing; indeed, a breakfast thing in Asia. Congee with fish. Bring to boil t...

It was 5 o’clock on a darkening Monday evening. I was in the local library doing some research, called browsing, with one eye on a book and the other on the high window that looks over Victoria Street and beyond. Outside, the north-west sky was a giant black cloud crying its heart out. Beneath it was a grey veil of rain stretching from Footscray to Broadmeadows. The cloud moved nearer and the downpour hit the library like thunder. The street outside turned that intense storm colour, a kind of seething yellow grey, like reflected lightning. The lights in the butcher shop and the shoe store across the road pixillated and a flash of red was a raincoat running for cover towards the shopfront verandah. By the time the rain stopped and the black cloud had rumbled east towards Heidelberg and Kew, it was almost dark anyway. I walked home in the cold wet dusk to the white house with the perennial borders. The pelargoniums are still in flower. Or again. They never stop. * Oh look, Al Gore ...

If you visit a place called The Tofu Shop you kind of know what you are going to eat. I used to eat there when I worked near Bridge Road, in that old red brick building that used to be a shirt factory and became an office block in the late eighties, when Australia was busy exporting manufacturing. The old red brick building had a neon sign on its roof that read 'PELACO' and I worked directly beneath the 'E'. I used to go to The Tofu Shop ('The' was part of its name, hence the capital T, although it looks wrong) because I liked the way they layered their dishes. You didn't just get a slab of soy curd, slippery and shaking like a jellyfish, on a plate. Instead, they used to layer textures and tastes in a way that kept you interested, like reading a thriller. Frameworks of steamed vegetables, grains of various kinds and legumes were built over with salads, the starring home-made tofu, or a combination of ingredients; and then topped with yogurt, or garlic o...