The lovely thing about being keen on food and cooking is that there is no end to the things you can learn. Here I was, strolling down a suburban street, minding my own business, when I happened upon a butcher’s shop. I stopped to ponder on what appeared to be just another display of meat, [...]

Aaaah, a pleasant day in the country. Lunch was a leg of lamb, a lamb, I might add, which had been born, raised, and slaughtered not all that far from the table on which we ate. The post-lunch recovery was spent assisting (more accurately, watching, bemused) the round-up of a flock of ewes and lambs, [...]

I started a career on ABC radio with a recipe for lamb shanks, and the place went wild. People were writing in from mansions and caravan parks for what is nothing at all really — just a simple mix of lamb shanks and water and vegetables, and patience.
It gave me great heart that some of [...]

A large leg of lamb is, more often than not, too much: too big, too long to cook, too hard to get perfectly pink all the way through. But, if you get your butcher to cut a leg into its individual segments, running his knife along the inner tracts of muscle and sinew and fibre, [...]

You might see lamb fillets in the butcher’s display tray. Be wary. These are more likely to come from mutton than lamb, and, although still tender, have a very gamey flavour, which may not appeal to too many modern palates. This is the flavour of big, fat sheep, coming from years of roaming wild pastures.

If [...]

The title will tell you where this recipe came from. Notice the formality and the nonsense added to give it a style of its own. It’s a menu item from the old restaurant, and menu writers, especially me in my heyday, do get carried away with detail. I sometimes think quality restaurants would be better [...]

Lamb chops are so familiar to all of us that they are rarely considered first-rate cooking. Nothing, to my mind, could be further from the truth. The bones pared to the loin and the chops cooked on a barbecue or grill make for a classic dish, beautiful to look at, delicious to the taste. The [...]

A hamburger might very well be the most popular . feed on the globe; at least the western part of it, anyway. Not surprising really. You get a filling feed, simply, quickly and cheaply, with a minimum of effort.

The irony is you can achieve a hugely superior product at home, simply, quickly, cheaply, with a [...]

I fell in love with a tiny Indian restaurant in Melbourne’s inner suburb of Fitzroy, and was particularly enchanted with the chef’s version of beef vindaloo. I adhered to my principle of asking for special recipes. Harjinder Singh Bhogal, who was in the midst of writing his own cook book, was happy to oblige.

2 tablespoons [...]

I’ve always believed you have to have been born in the Orient to be a dab hand at making curry, or slow-cooked meats, or spicy sauces. How else can you get close to understanding the flavours that come from a teaspoon of this, a cup of that, an infusion of something else? These are the [...]