What I cooked last night.

30 degrees at 7 p.m. and not much wind. Let's eat out. And let’s see how the boys are at outdoors dining this year. Seems not so long ago at least one of them was asleep in a pram at this hour. Time goes by so quickly, not slowly.

I like to commence the barbecue season with my personal King of Fishes - Tasmanian Atlantic Salmon. The cost of this fish stops it being an everyday choice, but it is cheaper at the market and is occasionally marked down in the supermarkets. And there it was at $19.95 a kilogram instead of its usual $30-$36.

I wrapped two fat fillets in foil together with two chopped spring onions, the juice of half an orange and a squirt of good quality soy sauce. That's it. The fillets were an inch at their thickest ridge and cooked in ten minutes over the coals. Never overcook this fish. I opened the foil and out burst an aroma of Chinatown and orange groves.

As if that wasn't cruel enough to the neighbours, my onion and garlic kebabs were even more fragrant: on a skewer, alternate sections of onion and garlic cloves and then brush with Thai red curry paste. Place these on a slightly cooler area of the grill or coals so that the onion almost caramelizes and the garlic - you can leave its skin on - bakes. You can vary the Thai paste to whatever you have in the fridge. Keep it vaguely East to suit the fish. I wasn't about to use Branston pickle, although come to think of it ...

One of the reasons I like dining outside is to watch the sky show put on by the clouds. Dinner beneath a ceiling of burnished cumulostratus in the shape of an elephant drifting southwestwards on a next-to-nothing breeze and slowly turning into an open-topped sportscar as it disappears over the horizon - which here is a line of fifteen-foot lilypillies - beats TV dinners any time.

Something of an accidental citrus theme continued through the salad: baked pumpkin pieces tossed through spinach, fresh from the garden, showered with toasted pine nuts and dressed with lime juice and olive oil.

Of course, we had started with citrus as well: a large half moon of lemon twisted back on the peel to release its oil and drowned in a long glass of one-third Gordon’s and two-thirds tonic. Drink a couple of these and you'll see your children's behaviour improve before your very eyes.

Actually they were very good: sat and ate their meals, perfectly behaved, before rounding out the night with locomotive laps of the table on their tricycles in the growing darkness. Then to bed.

By then, the cumulostratus sportscar had left the scene, leaving just a little wispy deep orange cirrostratus higher up in the sky. It didn't look like anything. Then the sky faded to black. The show was over.


*Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, c. 1744.

I have a collection of old photographs, many taken by my father. I may as well put them here.

The above picture, taken by my father during an Inverloch holiday in the summer of 1969-70, shows my younger sister feeding the baby of the family. Behind them partially obscured on a deck chair is the second youngest. My sister was six that summer, so that makes the boys almost two, and four and a half.

This is one of my mother’s favourite photographs: she recalls that the youngest was recovering from illness at the time. In the picture he looks tired but appears to be eating willingly. Today, my sister’s own youngest child is not much older than the brother she was feeding in the photograph forty years ago. Her serene expression and caring nature haven’t changed.

*

The house at Inverloch was a rambling Edwardian seaside farmhouse on a few acres at the top of a hill overlooking Anderson Inlet. Its bedrooms were cavernous and smelled like empty cedar wardrobes and the lounge room had dusty holiday-house curtains, an ancient bookcase stocked with old orange and white Penguins, and unmatching sink-into chairs in which to read them on endless summer afternoons. The kitchen, typically of early Australian farmhouses, could have fed fifty. Its fly-wire screen door banged onto a verandah that ran around the north, east and west walls, making the house cool and shady in summer. A windbreak of pine trees lined the drive; and at the back, a steep track had been cut through the bushy acres all the way down the hill to the beach. Across the track, the almost horizontal limb of a white gum stretched, low down. My mother used to sit the younger children on the branch and, rocking it gently, sing ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross, to see a fine lady upon a white horse, rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, she will have music wherever she goes*.

*

I drove my first car to Inverloch years later to see the old holiday house and rekindle memories. It had been abandoned and vandalised, a jagged-glass wreck. Brutal sunshine pierced broken roof tiles and ribcage roof rafters, making furnaces of its once-cool plastered rooms. Later the house was demolished completely, and today scores of look-alike units spill down the hill where once my mother rocked her laughing children on the branch of a white gum tree overlooking the sea.

*Gammer Gurton’s Garland, 1784

Oddly coincidental fact of the day. Or coincidentally odd fact of the day. Or just plain odd:

My last six addresses have been situated on exactly the same longitude.

From residence one I went north, north again, then far north; then a long way south, almost back to the middle north; and then a little further south again. But all within a second or two of longitude. All by sheer coincidence, of course. For example, the house we are in today is two doors away from one of our previous houses: we now live on our neighbours' right, where once we lived on their left. Perhaps we helped them feel as they’d had a move as well. I’m feeling quite dizzy just writing this paragraph, so let’s have a new one.

This whole conversation line (!) came about when I was cooking silver beet. Tracy and I were discussing the most redolent neighbourhood we had lived in; redolent in the aromatic not the malodorous sense; we’ve never lived near an abattoir or a rubbish tip or a Subway store, for example.

In the early eighties I lived in a terrace fifty metres from Lygon Street. I’d open a window first thing in the morning and the smell of toast and bacon and eggs would float in along with birdsong and the morning sun. Mid-morning you’d catch a hint of garlic and onion - the brewing lunchtime sauces of a hundred restaurants - and later in the day the pizza ovens would crank up and it was baking tomatoes and dough and anchovies on the air until midnight.

Later, I went north to Brunswick where on hot summer evenings the aromatic smoke from countless grills blanketed the suburb. This was accompanied by the fragrance of flat bread baking in giant ovens, enhanced by sesame and zatar and tram bells.

And then a little farther north again, not far past Moreland Road, perhaps a kilometre or two, where Indian spices - hand-ground and warmed gently from sleep - wake and send their perfume up into the atmosphere like urgent airborne appetisers on the early evening breeze, together with hot fenugreek-flavoured roti. You can’t smell Indian cooking – in its early stages when the spices are warming and the cooking process is just beginning - and not want to eat curry. It’s impossible.

So the curry wins. This is the most fragrant suburb in Melbourne.

Oh, I almost forgot. The silver beet:

Aromatic spices with chickpeas and silver beet.

Place two tablespoons of macadamia oil in a heavy-based pan and gently cook a chopped onion, three scored cloves of garlic, a teaspoon each of ground cinnamon and sweet paprika, and two teaspoons each of ground coriander and cumin seeds, until the onion is soft. You don't have to cook the onion first, just toss the whole lot in together.

Add two drained 425g tins of chickpeas, a tin of diced tomatoes, two tablespoons of tomato paste, a quarter cup of chopped dried apricots (I use the dark Turkish organic ones, not the bright orange ones) and cook through for a minute or two, stirring.

Now add a cup of water and about 500g of chopped silver beet minus stalks. Cook five minutes.

Stir through a small handful each of chopped fresh coriander and chopped fresh mint. Serve with thick yogurt and toasted segments of Lebanese bread.

Beans take a few months to grow, and then you have enough to feed a suburb. Unless you preserve them and who can be bothered doing that?

Our childhood household had a preserving set that was thrown out unceremoniously during the Great Food Revolution of the 1960s, when everyone abandoned vegetable gardens and turned to the supermarket for salvation. It was called liberation, from chores and peeling; from chopping and wrapping up scraps in newspaper to be placed in corrugated galvanised iron rubbish bins with lids that clattered along the street in a storm like hubcaps off a car.

My father persisted with his vegetable garden through the flower power years, growing radishes well into the early seventies until everyone stopped eating them. People laughed out loud when they saw them on his salad platters, as if they were some kind of odd food relic from an earlier time. Yes! They are edible! So the 1970s arrived and the radish was out and the exotic avocado was in; but you didn’t grow avocadoes, you bought them, just like asparagus, which came in cans, limp and grey, to be served in crustless sandwiches. Liberation! And cans of vegetables!

So Dad retired his vegetable garden and took up eclectic pursuits such as painting in oils, reading the form guide, raising zebra finches and drinking endless cups of tea. The garden was turned over to some kind of surly perennial and the only edible plant on the property that remained, apart from the mint border that you couldn’t kill, was a straggly choko vine that clung to the garage, holding it together. I don’t remember ever eating a choko; but once the vine went, the garage fell apart; but my brother’s gargantuan Mark IX Jaguar might have had something to do with that. (He stored it behind the garage when he went overseas, and had to excise part of the garage wall to angle the car out a couple of years later; because a tree had grown larger, blocking its egress. The things you don't think of.)

Now everything old is new again and people are ripping up old lawns and digging lumps of concrete and old bricks out of the ground and doing soil analyses so that they don't poison their children with lead and arsenic in the guise of ‘returning to the earth’. It’s the new liberation: liberation from the supermarket that was once salvation from labor. No wonder religion gets a bad name.

Now all we need is a Fowlers Vacola preserving set. (Funny thing: everyone had Fowlers Vacola sets in the fifties - along with pressure cookers – but they were unsighted until they all turned up about ten years ago at garage sales, meaning they must have sat in attics for around forty years before people turfed them out. My sociological conclusion: people keep things they know they will never use for forty years, just to be sure. Proof: recently, I have noticed an abundance of orange or lime green electric fry pans circa 1970 at garage sales and op shops, complete with grimy old brown plug-in cords. Yes, it's safe to throw them out now! Bingo: a thesis. Where’s my grant?)

*

Back to the beans. About three thousand of them ripened at once, necessitating a day of harvesting and picking. I am proud to say that Thomas sat on the lawn, in the shade, and podded (yes, that is a word, we used to do it in the 1960s) a whole colander full of broad beans, occasionally chewing on one. A job not to William’s liking; he rode his bicycle up and down all the while, singing Ridin’ the Rails, à la Johnny Cash: "Mm, mm, mm, mmmm."


Middle Eastern-style broad beans pureed with garlic, cumin and coriander.

Harvest a kilogram of broad beans. Get your children to pod them. You don’t have to peel the individual beans, a job that would take you about a week.

Meanwhile, cook two chopped onions in olive oil in a large heavy pot for three or four minutes, add two scored cloves of garlic, cook a little more, and then add two teaspoons of ground cumin, half a teaspoon of cayenne pepper and a dash of ground coriander.

Now add the beans along with a cup or so of water. At this stage, I had to upgrade to a larger pot. How are we going to eat all of this? Cook on low heat until the beans soften.

Now add half a cup of lemon juice, two or three more tablespoons of olive oil, and process in batches to a semi-smooth consistency. Reheat if desired, adding chopped coriander or dill.

Ideal on grilled fish; wrapped in pita or Turkish bread with kebabs; as an accompaniment to chick pea and tomato stew; on toasted Lebanese bread with zatar (particularly delicious); dipped with those red pickled turnips you find in middle eastern shops; dipped with fresh blanched new-season asparagus; served on baked potato and scattered with toasted pine nuts and blackened sesame (again, particularly delicious); eaten straight out of the jar with a spoon standing in front of the fridge, etc etc etc, ad infinitum, so on and so forth.

*

Now: what am I going to plant where the beans were?

Maybe radishes. Maybe not.

Ward Four South on a cool spring day. I’m sitting on a chair next to my mother’s bed. The doctor had called me a couple of hours earlier to tell me the surgery had been completed and all was looking fine. He sounded jovial, like someone who has just come into the clubhouse after eight rounds of golf.

There are tubes and clipboard charts and electronic bed elevation controls all over the bed and I’m afraid to come too near for fear of disconnecting something or tipping my mother onto the floor. I tell her not to talk, because she can’t. She ignores me. She talks. She is euphoric in that delirious post-operative way when the drugs are still working and before the pain hits.

*

The fourth admission had been successful. The planets had aligned, three months after the first attempt. When you finally get into the system, it works perfectly well. Meaning doctors, not necessarily hospitals in the wider sense. If you could have doctors without the bureaucracy: Médecins Sans Hôpitaux.

We sat and looked across the ward, where the view from the window is partially blocked by the northern wing. Beyond that, part of the roofline of University High School and the tops of some straggly old eucalypts shivering in the fresh afternoon breeze.

*

Next day she was not in the ward when I visited. I asked at the nurse station and the nurse pointed to the other end of the floor and I found her in a smaller, two-bed ward looking north over Parkville's Victorian slate rooftops towards peaceful, empty Royal Park. Less euphoric now. And sore. But eating. And desperate for a cup of tea. Tea: the wonder drug of my parent’s generation, and others. Strong and hot and sweet. They used to drink on hundred degree days. It cooled you down, they said.

She was tired. They had moved patients around after an altercation in the larger ward the previous night during which patients had been kept awake by disruption at one of the beds; someone’s quarrelling relatives. Why would you quarrel in a hospital at night? Drugs. I asked if they had had the quarrelers removed. A little law and order, perhaps? No, they had brought in a counselor. Imagine that. Late at night in a big-city hospital and they bring in someone to sit down and flap ineffectual hands and try and negotiate or arbitrate with drug addicts. What a job. What a world.

*

She went home after five days and much discussion between hospital factions. One faction, the throughput analysts, kept telling my mother she was to go home the second day after surgery; and the second faction, the doctor, kept overruling the first.

We are taking it in turns to tend her over the next few weeks. She may not lift anything heavier than a very small pot of water. Every time we visit she tries to leap up and put the kettle on. And then she remembers. We might have to tie her to her chair. For her own good. With the radio close by, so she can turn Radio National up loud.

Three or four weeks after the scan. The required procedure or operation or whatever they call it was a laminectomy, which sounds like what you do when you renovate a 1950s kitchen, but is actually a way of easing pressure on the spinal nerve where it was being squeezed by the spine at the neck where it passes close to the gullet, or was it the oesophagus? The procedure was required soon, because my mother was having trouble breathing properly and couldn’t raise her arms, because the nerve radiates out and down the shoulders and arms. Don’t quote me on it, I’m not a doctor.

*

She was admitted four times. They rang her up and told her she was top of the list, and to be ready and prepared, like a parachute-backpacked airman set for a night mission, or an alert fireman on a hot day. Also, don’t eat anything after ten the night before, they said. And be here at the crack of dawn, they said. Fine. Four times.

The first time there was an emergency, meaning a more urgent case came up that morning, while she was already there, having arrived at the crack of dawn. Apparently they don’t have spare surgeons sitting around twiddling their thumbs or drinking coffee or surfing the net. It must be the only profession in the world with no down time. I used to work in one of the busiest industries in the world, and I still went nuts from boredom every second week. I should have been a doctor. They call my mother’s case ‘elective’, meaning you don’t die if it’s not done today. So they sent her home after five hours and told her she was still top of the list. That was nice to know.

*

It’s all her own fault, of course. The fact is, she wouldn’t die if they didn’t operate today or next week or next year. She’s fit as a fiddle and twice as mobile, strong as an ox and twice as stubborn. She walks a mile - each way - to the shops in North Essendon every day, and sometimes twice a day because she can’t lift anything heavy; so it’s bread in the morning and milk in the afternoon. She’s a voracious reader so she has to double her trips to the Moonee Valley Regional Library because she can only carry two or three books at a time. She gets on the tram that roars up Pascoe Vale Road, turns the corner into Fletcher Street, sails along Mt Alexander Road through the date palm plantation and tears around into Keilor Road; and she’s read three chapters of the first book before she gets off and walks the mile home. Of course, I deliver the heavy shopping, but she's always thinking of an excuse to do the Keilor Road dash. She's never driven a car.

Another three weeks drifted past, and she was called in again. This time the anaesthetist went missing. This is how hospitals work. It’s like the alignment of the planets. It might not happen often, but it does happen eventually. First you get the patients in and then you find an anaesthetist, a surgeon, a nurse, a sergeant-major at the front desk, and someone to count them all; and if one doesn’t turn up or is called away to an urgent case or gets stuck in Monash Freeway traffic or has a headache, you tell the patient to go away and come back next week, or next month, and good afternoon.

Being a person of generous spirit – she always has waifs and strays to Christmas and then they keep visiting – she did not become annoyed after the first or the second or even the third wait (only three hours this time), but her condition was not improving either. The odd thing is that the always very pleasant admitting staff became more and more apologetic about each cancellation, and so the effect was that my mother felt guilty and apologised right back to them, for being a nuisance or something. People are like that. It’s a funny world.

I was sitting in a waiting room in a hospital again. The parent this time; not a child. Again the waiting room was empty. Again a television was talking to itself in a corner, like a mad vicar preaching to an empty church. Again there was a sign that read Do not touch television controls. Again I switched it off.

It was eight o'clock at night. My mother had the last appointment of the day. I had driven her to Grattan Street and we walked through the maze that is the new RMH, now grafted to the RWH, and we were confused because you don't know which hospital you are in any more.

*

We had walked along half a kilometre of corridors and through sets of those flapping doors you only find in hospitals and restaurants, and then we had found the right place and we had gone in and sat down and a smiling Indian male nurse had come out and given my mother a two-page form on a clipboard that asks you to confirm you don't have any conditions and you are not micro-chipped and you don't have a gun in your pocket and you won't sue anybody for anything because they are not responsible, and he had asked her to read it and sign it. Fine. She read it and signed it.

Then the smiling Indian nurse had whisked her away through a door to a room where a giant CT scanning machine the size of a spaceship lay waiting to emit strange discordant whirrs and beeps and high-pitched screams and base drones, with my mother inside it, while it flew her to Mars and back.

*

I sat in the waiting room and read Blake Morrison's And When Did You Last See Your Father? in the kind of silence you get when you are the last appointment of the day in a hospital clinic, and the only other person there is the cleaner who wanders through quietly, empties the waste paper basket quietly and closes the door quietly. And When Did You Last See Your Father? is a chronicle of child’s farewell to his dying father and is probably not the best thing to read when you are in a hospital waiting room with your octogenarian mother; but neither were the trashy magazines with lurid out-of-focus cover pictures of half-dressed B-grade celebrities on the table.

In a little while my mother came out and we walked back through the maze, anti-clockwise this time, and I drove her home and turned the car radio to Radio National. She listens to Radio National all the time. She loves it.

One-inch pillows of fresh salmon, poached ever so gently in a little wine and garlic. Strips of avocado added to warm through.

Egg noodles cooked until just done, drained and draped in ringlets on white plates. Salmon pillows and avocado strips placed in little cairns on the pasta.

A little cream in the pan juices, reduced in the wine with salt and pepper and poured over each dish.

A large glass of cold chardonnay, glinting yellow in the gathering dusk.

The first outdoor evening meal of spring has to be special and it was.

*

We had an afternoon tea for Thomas's birthday; crustless sandwiches, and small open pastries filled with lightly beaten egg and tiny bacon squares and shards of spring onion. And tea: my favourite Earl Grey.

*

I'd been discussing euphemisms earlier in the day with a teacher. Teachers know all about euphemisms. They have to use them. It's enforced by Education Department bureaucrats. We had been discussing reports in the news of students stealing from convenience stores, vandalising property and being drunk in a public place.

The default language now used to describe this behaviour is 'making poor choices'. That really grates. Making a poor choice is when you choose a strawberry milkshake when you really prefer caramel; or buying a Hyundai Excel when you're six feet tall; or buying your wife an iron for Christmas. Stealing and vandalising are criminal acts and should be described thus.

Another one, or maybe it's just a stupid cliche, or lazy language: the government keeps stating that asylum-seekers will be sent to Indonesia to be 'processed'. Makes it sound like they're going to be turned into cheese spread.

Ice-cream on the lawn is always a nice idea, mid-afternoon on a warm spring day. Thomas will be three tomorrow.

The best food books have just one subject. No, not food itself: I mean a single subject within the vast world of cooking and eating. Here are four of my favourites:

CHEESE:
I Love Cheese by Teubner, Mair-Waldberg and Ehlert

Read this book and you may never eat another Kraft Singles sandwich again. There are cheeses in this book that even the man behind the cheese counter at Leo's in Kew may never have heard of: Slovakian Ostiepok, a smoked ovoid cheese, brown like a baked potato; Queso Ahumado, smoked and made from goat’s, cow’s and sheep’s milk; Burrata; Israeli Galil, like Roquefort; Irish Crimlin Fourme d’Ambert. The latter is described by the authors as a cheese with 'surface flora adding to its pronounced taste' and you can just about see the surface flora growing and smell the result in the the accompanying full colour photograph.

Then there are the recipes, revealing the alchemical nature of cheese in being able to turn an ordinary foodstuff into a meal fit for a king.

Take the gratin of celery: lengths of humble celery are sweated in butter and spring onions, cooked in stock, layered in a rectangular baking dish, scattered with sliced prosciutto, and baked with the reduced stock poured over, along with double cream, grated pecorino romano and grated parmesan. I want some now.

Oh, and have you ever tried obatzter? It's a snack traditionally eaten with beer in Germany: ripe Camembert mixed with onions, paprika and pepper. Beats Bega Bar-B-Cubes.
(Alto Books, 2008; translated by Transedition from Teubner Edition.)

SAUCES:
Sauces by James Peterson

Throw out the White Crow, you'll never use it again. This third edition could be your only cookbook and you'd never be short of a meal idea. A history of sauces, cookware, ingredients, stocks, national and regional sauces including asian dipping sauces, dessert sauces and more. Sauces clears up the confusion of pompous restaurant menu descriptions and clarifies (pardon the pun) the differences between concassees, coulis, purees, jus, reductions and gravies. You might even be able to turn the tables on the waiter (pardon again) and rebuke him for a menu misnomer, Stephen Downes-style.

What makes a book is the quality its writing. Mark Bittman: "...what's special about Sauces is the text: it reads so well that this is the kind of book you can take to bed." Don't fall asleep while holding it up: a dropped hardback of 612 pages could damage you.

From Page 486: Indian mint pesto - process a cup of mint leaves, two tablespoons each of jalapenos and onion, a little finely chopped ginger, four teaspoons of lemon juice, three tablespoons of almond butter (toasted almonds pureed with butter) and salt. Nice on chargrilled fish with a sprinkling of coriander.
(John Wiley & Sons, Inc 2008)

BARBECUE:
The Barbecue Bible by Steve Raichlen

I've mentioned this book several times in the past. Raichlen toured the world to find barbecue such as the following:

Senegalese Fish Yassa
Fish – ideally darker, rich-fleshed - is first marinated in lemon, salt and pepper and then direct-grilled and served with a tangy sauce of onions, Scotch bonnet chiles, paprika, seed mustard, lemon juice and distilled white vinegar.

Tuna Raito
Raichlen visited a barely-inhabited island off the Cote d’Azur to find lightly-grilled tuna steaks served with a reduced and pureed sauce ‘Raito’ – of onion and quite a lot of garlic with tomato, red wine, thyme, bay, olives and capers.

Read this book and you’ll never look at another burnt sausage in white bread again. If you ever did.
(Workman Publishing, New York,1998)

PIES:
Tarts with Tops on by Tamasin Day-Lewis

All you ever wanted eat between, on top of, or below pastry. My earlier review here.

Any other favourite single-subject food books?

It must have been the reminiscing about Chinese food. Or sitting on top of the West Gate Bridge for two hours. But that night, something fast and tasty was needed on the table.

Was there no warning?

It seemed the whole of Melbourne was on the bridge, going east or west; not that you can go north or south, but you know what I mean. 'Delay' signs are everywhere at the best of times, but that could mean five or ten minutes. Two hours is not a delay; it's half a day. Ten years ago, the State government changed a perfectly good Victorian motto from 'Victoria On the Move' to 'Victoria The Place to Be'. 'Victoria Expect Delays' would have been more accurate, although there were plenty of people with nothing to do but 'be' as they sat on top of the bridge on Saturday staring down at the docks and the half-loaded ships and the grimy river. By the way, avoid the bridge at weekends until Christmas. There’s always the western ring road via Thomastown if you want to go to west; but that's like going to Adelaide via Broken Hill. You'll get there eventually but it's a long journey. Not that I'm comparing Broken Hill with Thomastown.

We took the long way home. North up Williamstown Road, hook into Geelong Road, across the Gordon Street bridge overlooking the Western Oval (where Jeff Fehring famously kicked a goal from behind the centre in 1978), down into Gordon Street, Van Ness Avenue to Maribyrnong Road, Waverley Street to Buckley Street, east and back home to civilisation. Speaking of Moonee Ponds, why is every second car in Puckle Street a black Mercedes these days? And who are all those glowering men with shaved heads, sitting at outdoor cafe tables, smoking sullenly and not drinking their coffee?

Just wondering. I spent every Saturday morning of my childhood in that street, while Mum and Dad shopped in Silman's the grocer and Gilbertson's the butcher; and there were never any Mercedes Benzes, let alone black ones. And there was only one cafe and that was Bruno's. And men were too busy to sit around.

*

Almost home now, Caulfield Cup on the car radio. That man again: Bart Cummings' seventh Caulfield Cup winner, but his first since 1991. Viewed also won last year’s Melbourne Cup. Funny name for a horse.

*

So it was a long day. Dinner was late.

Baked trevally with Asian vegetables.

An excellent Asian meal can be prepared in minutes if you have the right ingredients ready. I placed a thick, fresh, glistening piece of trevally (silver warehou) on foil, splashed it with tamari, sprinkled it with grated ginger and chopped spring onion and a little chili, double-wrapped it in foil and threw it in the oven. Don't take 'threw' literally. Place it gently.

While the fish baked, and it didn't take long, I heated some peanut oil in the wok and tossed around a chopped onion and strips of red capsicum. Three minutes of that and then in went three small bunches of buk choy chopped into two-inch lengths right down to, and including, their bases.

Meanwhile, I boiled the kettle to pour over some rice noodles. They cook in seconds.

Within fifteen minutes, the baked soy-and-ginger fish aroma was too much to bear so I dragged it out of the oven and the fish was was opaque and moist and steaming and perfect.

Noodles in the base of two bowls; vegetables over the top; sections of fish over the vegetables. Chopsticks to serve: they make Asian food taste better. Not sure why. Someone must know.

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 price according to the size of your pot, and the price would vary every time, but that was part of the fun because it was always cheap. A whole pot of fried rice for $2.50! Or even $1.95!

That was then. The bureaucrats stamped on it pretty smartly, because of Regulations. For the next forty years you left your pot in the cupboard and your Chinese takeaway food came in plastic containers with lids, inside plastic bags. And lots of them, because a teenager can eat three plastic containers of fried rice and seven sesame toasts.

Then the bureaucrats stamped on plastic because of Regulations, again; and Chinese takeaway food came in glossy white open cardboard boxes with little swinging metal handles, about the size of a doll’s handbag - and looking just as ridiculous - and you needed five or six to feed a teenager.

*

My favourite takeaway place for fried rice in the early days was Jan Chong in Bulla Road while, later, Smith Street’s Middle Kingdom made great butter chicken, and szechuan dishes that blew your skull off. Then there was Harvest Moon. No, that was a Neil Young album.

I dined at Middle Kingdom on the night Essendon defeated Hawthorn in a Grand Final. How do I remember this? Here's why: the owner, who used to walk around dispensing port to his favourite customers out of a Chinese tea pot ("Special Chinese tea," he explained, with a Jackie Chan grin) told me the chef was a Hawthorn fan and was very upset that night and might poison us if he found out we were celebrating. As it turned out, the szechuan chicken was particularly spicy that night. We dined at Middle Kingdom regularly and, one hot night the following summer, after a Test match at the MCG, the owner pointed out a diner at the next table to my eight-year-old son (William and Thomas’s much older brother) and asked him if he realised who the man was. He didn't. "It’s Clive Lloyd!" the owner revealed triumphantly, Jackie Chan grin frozen in place, waiting for the boy's reaction. Lloyd turned around genially, smiling, waiting for the inevitable request for an autograph, or at least a shaken hand. "Who’s Clive Lloyd?" replied my son, brow furrowed, chopsticks poised in mid-air. Clive Lloyd and Jackie Chan roared with laughter. Not be recognised by face or name during a Test in a cricket-mad city made Lloyd’s night. Then we all had some more special Chinese tea and my son had a banana fritter.

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Other Chinese cafes I’ve eaten at, or ordered takeaway from: Red Harvest, New Moon, Moon Harvest. Fu Lu, Num Fong. Red Emperor (or was that a fish?), Lucky Kingdom, Lucky Corner, Lucky Dragon, Lucky Lantern. Double Happiness, Happy Inn, Jade Inn, Jade Princess, Jade Valley, Dragon Valley, Dragon Temple, Bamboo Dragon, Old Panda, New Panda, Golden Panda, Golden Swan, Happy Swan, Happy Stork, Fairy Stork, Ping On, Chung On, Sing Tao, Chiew Yong, Sun Luk, Yu Palace, Orchid Garden, Silver Chopsticks, Lotus Pond, Ming Court.

There's at least one of these in every outer suburb and small town in every country of the world to which the Chinese migrated. It’s all about the name. That, and the flock wallpaper, and the oriental prints on the walls depicting Far East rivers and mountains, and the Chinese opera lady who sounds like a melodious cat in the tinny speaker in the ceiling, and the mysterious red curtain at the back that doesn’t quite conceal the roar and sizzle and alarming flashes of flame from the kitchen. These characteristics make a Chinese café. It’s not just about the food.

For example, I’ve never eaten at the Ivanhoe Chinese Restaurant in Upper Heidelberg Road. The appeal just isn’t there. Why couldn’t they call it the Happy Dragon?

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Sometimes the fragrance of that pot of original fried rice comes floating back through some intricate fifth-dimension conduit – like the Internet (famously, once, "a series of tubes"; laughed at as if it were ridiculous, but I thought it unpretentiously, naively poetic) that carries only cooking aromas, throughout the universe, back to those who smelled them once, long ago, in a saucepan.

Fried rice with ham, peas and shrimps.

Boil rice. You need four cups of boiled, cooked, cooled rice. I figure that to be one and one half cups of uncooked rice.

Lightly beat two eggs with salt and pepper, pour into a small pan and scramble lightly, drawing uncooked egg with fork; switch off heat when egg starts to set. Place lid on pan to complete setting process. Tear or cut into strips when set.

Chop some good ham into small strips or cubes. A little less than a cupful of chopped ham should be enough. Cook a cup of peas. Chop two spring onions into small rounds. Open a can of shrimps, if you can’t be bothered obtaining fresh small prawns. The canned ones are fine for fried rice.

Peel a medium onion and chop it through its axis into slender segments. Heat peanut oil in a wok and fry the onion over high heat, tossing it around. Add ham, fry a minute. Add rice and peas, stir through over heat for two minutes or until rice is hot.

Now add the egg, the spring onions and the prawns; toss in two tablespoons of good soy sauce. Heat through well and serve.

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.

The travelling poppies have put in their annual appearance, this year a week or two early; deciding to position themselves in the very hot north-facing bed that catches the mid-morning sun, and which last summer saw the demise of the hedge of Pale Lilac Perennial Balsam, Impatiens Oliveri. 2008 poppy here (scroll down to November) and 2007 version here. Seems they're travelling north year by year.

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Further garden clippings: this morning, I put in Tigeress and Amish Oxblood, which sound like horses from yesterday’s Caulfield Guineas but are in fact two heirloom tomatoes (Tigerella is a different, hybrid version in some countries). They went into the front vegetable strip which is currently sprouting broadbeans in all directions.

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Digressing wildly, and speaking of yesterday’s races, the final seconds of the Toorak Handicap were a dramatic triumph, the kind of finish that has the caller struggling to reveal the outcome with several horses hitting the line as one, and the actual winner’s name only mentioned for the first time milliseconds after the finish, having come so dramatically from behind. Yesterday, Bart Cummings-trained Allez Kingdom, carrying the lightest weight, grabbed the prize. (Leading up to the spring racing carnival and the Melbourne Cup, it is worth noting that Cummings’ first involvement in a Cup was in 1950 when he strapped for his father who trained Comic Court to victory.