Top Dogs

A selection from Media Watch's Dogs of the Week.

Hauyagahn?

I had an experience today that made me take stock. We dropped in on some friends in Beaudesert; I say 'friends', but actually they're more friends of Little Sister. I don't know them that well. As we sat drinking our coffee, the brother of the two gave us directions to where we might find something we were looking for. His accent was so thick I could only pick out every other word, making the instructions totally useless. Australia being a nation of migrants, this was not an unfamiliar experience. What made it novel was that the accent was Australian.

It's been so long since I've been around hardcore bogans that my ear is obviously well out of tune. It's an accent I more or less grew up with, having spent a good slice of my upbringing in a flan-shirted bogan/farming patch of dirt. I've been mixing with well-educated nouveau-snob inner-city folk for longer than I realised.

La Cuisine de Zézette

I enjoy cooking. I have been fairly absent from the kitchen over the past few months, but when I do shove the dirty dishes aside and sharpen the knife I perk up. We had a dish tonight that is quite simple, but puts a smile on the faces of the adults in the house every time it's served.*

There are two variations, appropriate for what's in the fridge and how much time you have to potter about. First, the faster one: chicken.

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- About half a kilo of chicken, diced. (I used thigh fillets tonight, which I think are better in a casserole like this than breast meat. You could use portions with the bones still in, too.)
- Onion
- Garlic
- Fresh rosemary (About a three inch stem)
- Fresh parsley (A good, big handful. Don't be stingey, now. No, dried won't do. Go and buy some seeds and grow some.)
- A bay leaf or two. Dried is OK here, fresh even better.
- A variety of vegetables; tonight's selection was mushrooms, zucchini and red capsicum.
- Chicken stock, just enough to almost cover the chicken and veg. (Do I need to tell you? Not that radioactive powdered shit.)

- Cook the onion and garlic (gently!) in an unfashionably decent slosh of olive oil. (Tip the bottle up a bit! It won't kill you! Give those onions a bit of room to swim.) Allow it to cook slowly so that the flavour develops.

- Crank up the heat a little and throw the chicken in on top to brown a bit.

- Vegies in next. Just saute them a little.

- Stock in (to three quarters of the way over the ingredients), then the herbs.

- Simmer gently, covered, until the chicken's cooked and the vegetables look to be done to your taste. For me, I think it was about 20 minutes or so. Maybe less.

- Serve with cous cous.

So easy, so yummy. Even better when you substitute some of the stock with white wine.

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The slower version involves beef and red wine (and new potatoes when I can get them), and takes several hours to simmer.

- Cook onion and garlic as before. (Still no meanness with the oil, you fashion slave, you.)

- Brown the beef.

- Add the stock (beef or vegetable, or a combination of the two), wine and herbs, put the lid on and turn the heat right down to simmer very gently. The liquid should fully cover the meat in this variation.

- Tie a bib around your neck; it'd be embarrassing to be caught with all that drool down your front as the house fills with delicious aromas. Do your best not to "sample" all the meat out of it before you serve it.

- After an hour or so, you can add the new potatoes if you're using them.

- Only when the meat and potatoes are starting to show signs of becoming tender, add the vegetables; harder ones first, softer ones later.

- Don't take the pot off the heat until the meat is really tender. Every time I make this I check the meat every half hour or so, and begin to wonder if it's ever going to be edible. Don't sweat it. It seems to stay tough for ages, then after a couple of hours suddenly relents and becomes pliable. Just be patient.

I've served this with cous cous, or if I don't add potatoes to the pot, steamed, baked or mashed potato. Or really nice fresh bread. And any of the wine I haven't swilled over the afternoon while checking the pot's progress.

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As I said, it's very simple. It's hardly ground-breaking. It's just something that's evolved since I've been a herb grower. I enjoyed it so much tonight that I thought I'd share it.

Next week: another treat from La Cuisine de Zézette: saggy, rubbery orange cake with a god-awful crack in the top. Don't miss it.


*The four-year-old spat it down her front tonight in a tantrum. At least she didn't puke, as she has done previously.

Office Guns

Stress. I've got it in big, drippy chunks. I had considered your usual array of stress-reduction strategies like yoga, good diet, indiscriminate drunken sex, meditation and so on, but my friend Magoo has kindly let me into a secret which renders such efforts unnecessary: Office guns.

It started in a meeting. We were playing bullshit bingo, and on the third round I thought to myself: "Oh my God! Can't someone just shoot that bastard?" I was getting tired of bullshit bingo and was fingering with some office supplies. As a sworn Lego-fan, I always try to connect things together. I was connecting two Maulies, then suddenly one of them flew across the room and hit the boring speaker right on the nose. He got a nose-bleed and had to stop the presentation early.

Later that week, people came in to thank me. Some even brought chocolate. But most of them wanted to know where I had bought that fabulous gun. I showed them how it was made. They were thrilled and from that day on, we haven't had a single boring presentation.

Someone said to me that I could patent the use of the Maulies and sell the ideas. But I told him: "There is enough greed in the world. I want to help people. I want their life to be a better life. I want them to have what I have. A whole range of guns. Made from office supplies."

Oh yeah! Screw that mediation I've got scheduled for next week -- my workplace irritant is copping a Super Maul first thing Monday morning, then I'm heading out for an early four-hour lunch.

(To Do List: sharpen pencils.)

**Insert Bad Egg Pun Here**

If you don't worship our saviour, why celebrate our holiday?

The Christian groups are pretty active on the St Lucia campus, and over the past week I've seen the above sentence on several of their sandwich boards. Beyond the vaguest irritation, I have no particular issue with them doing their thing. I'm the life-and-let-live type. But I do take exception to that statement.

You, being the well-read type that you are, don't need telling that Easter has its origins in pre-Christian culture. No less an eminence than the Venerable Bede wrote that the name derives from the name of the Anglo-Saxon goddess of fertility, rebirth and spring, Eostre. Accounts vary on just what characteristics Eostre had; some say she had hare's ears; others say she carried a basket of eggs around; yet others have it that she had a rabbit pal who hid eggs in amongst the greenery to bring new life to them. Most seem to agree that she was a playful lass who everyone was pleased to be welcoming, along with the warm weather and all that that meant after a long, dark winter.

It's autumn here, so the rituals associated with Easter make as much sense as the other European cultural imports do. We have no breaking of frost to celebrate, no garlands of flowers to gather. Despite that, I like it as a cultural connection to my European roots. Easter to me is a big sigh of relief that summer -- not winter -- is over, and the sanity of cool weather is on the way. For the first time in months, we can hide chocolate eggs in the backyard and be fairly certain that they won't be an ant-infested puddle within the hour. That's worth a Super-Size serve of whoopee, for sure.

So it's not your bloody holiday, thanks very much. I'm happy enough to share it with you, but when you start snatching and grabbing I get a bit cranky. Now have an Easter bilby and be nice.