Home cooking...

"Oggi la cucina la fai tu", pronounced my infinitely better half, so off I went to the kitchen as any obedient husband would - abandoning without a murmur of dissent my nursery-furniture making in 'Australia's best shed' that I built for the purpose... (there's the new grandson - number five in rank - to cater for. Poor Rocco and Callista in Hawaii will miss out again)!

Just to let off a bit of steam while cooking (a homemade arborio rice risotto with homemade stock, smells delish!):

For some reason our resident self-styled leftie radio commentator Philip Adams (I think he waves this particular flag because it's a nice and easy way to make money in this so desperately polically correct island nation) gets my goat everytime he's on air on the ABC.

Combine his self-sufficient rantings with a bit of facile book promo talk by the likes of Bruce Shapiro and John Dean (whom he actually offered political asylum, though not necessarily on that spread of his in the Hunter Valley!), a bottle of 2002 Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc and the above-mentioned cooking and I get very hot indeed under the collar! I swear outrageously at every utterance of the suave apologist for regime change (in Washington and Canberra, to be sure), and I nearly over-fry my onions...

The smell is delicious; but I'm getting jack of American accents as well - who do they think they are? I regret telling my pelicans "Think American" when they were small: today my eldest, who's pasturing some offspring of his own in their birthplace, Hawaii, boldly declares he's keen to get an American passport. More fool he, who could have had the best of both worlds with an Italian AND an Australian passport...

The Cyberbrat rang this arvo to say a medical deputation of four, called in by an overzealous woman GP to assess an alleged malformation of the suckling's snout, had given the all-clear: there was nothing wrong with the brat's first-born! Which is exactly what I told her weeks ago, when she was subject to near-depression with worry induced by this somehow qualified health pro who didn't even know how to bandage my finger back in 1997 when I'd ripped it wide open with a corkscrew...

(It's ironic to remember that when I plucked Her Blogging Highness from the Hamburg clinic in 1971 as a new-born, one of the doctors commented "what a pity she's mongoloid"! Please go back to med school for two years, and don't pass judgement!)

CB had just made her first foray to the capital by bus and baby pouch, only to be turned away at the door by her older sister - who, it must be admitted in evidence, had just days before dropped her second child, a healthy son. It seems they met again on day two, before CB caught the bus back to Losers' Paradise... We collected her and walked her home, amid great remonstrations about my failure to lay on proper transport... such is life.

Bianca meanwhile pronounced the risotto quite edible - in fact she took three helpings! I must be doing something right - despite the handful of hot Hungarian peppers from her garden that I sneaked into the pot...

Ci penso io!

NB: I read in Der Stern Magazine (online) that two thirds of German motorists now prefer to walk or take a bicycle rather than the car for short distances - due to the sharp rise in petrol prices. This makes me feel doubly good about walking some six kilometres several days a week to get my newspaper, or to post international registered documents to my prospective German pension provider... (the new VW van meanwhle rests/rusts? quietly in its new carport).