This is I believe my one hundredth post. For those who are reading I hope that you have enjoyed these odd jottings about food and music. If you have enjoyed please feel free to add a comment and/or pass on the web address to others who may be interested.

Last night I drove with Paul to Manchester to watch Mark Mulcahy at the Night & Day Cafe. It was a pig of an evening, sleet and rain swirling around the motorway and coming down in great wet gobs. The Night & Day Cafe was on old pub with a long bar, giant moose head hung on the wall and a small stage at the end. They were selling Wainwright Bitter and I regretted the decsion to drive.

Mark was wearing an ill-fitting red suit and pink shirt and he was joined by a bass player and a key board playing drummer. As I said to Paul it must require some kind of special coordination to play a drum kit with one hand and your feet and use your spare hand to play the keyboard.He must have been good at rubbing the top of your hand and your chest.

They played a mixture of songs going back to Mr Mingo from Surprise Surprise. I shouted out for All For The Best but as Mark said, “That was greedy”. Throughtout the hour and a half he was on stage it was his voice that held it, moving from a soft growl to falsetto all in the same song. Sometimes it was just Mark on stage with his guitar and they then moved onto (almost) foot on the monitors powerpop. There was a nursery ryhme simplicity to some of it, with lyrics going through the letters of the alphabet and animals escaping from a zoo, breaking down to band and audience making random animal noises.

I am pleased to say that he stuck to the one guitar rule, although there was a second guitar at the back of the stage that did not get touched. The quieter moments were perhaps the highlights especialy at the end when he took us through Hey Self Defeater – the song Nick Hornby wrote about in 31 Songs.

After the show there were no t-shirts but I was able to pick up a couple of CDs I didn’t have and Mark came round and shook my hand and signed his new 7 inch single.

We have been listening to the CD’s this evening.

As anticipated I had partridge again to eat. When furtling around a week or so ago trying to find a suitable recipe for quince I came across a book by Christopher Lloyd that Julie gave me a few years ago, Gardner Cook, and amongst the good things he had to say about quince there was a recipe for Stewed Chicken and Quince. It was from Jane Grigson’s Good Things  and in the margin he’d noted ‘so good and easy’. It looked readily adaptable for my partridge.

Given my day at work I fully anticipated that the partridge, taken out of freezer last night to de-frost, would have been found by a cat and eaten. But it was still there and ready for cooking.

I heated some oil in a cast iron pan and threw in the partridge to brown. An onion was finely chopped and thrown in, followed by some ginger and garlic. Once that had cooked through it was seasoned well with salt, pepper and hot paprika. That then cooked through before a glass of water was added and brought to the boil. At this point the Jane Grigson recipe said that the chicken should be cooked for an hour before adding the quince that should have been fried off in butter. I departed from that I simply added the quartered quince to the pan which was covered and all went into the oven for 40 minutes.

By then the quince was collapsing and the partridge cooked through.

I have cooked a partridge three times now over the the last five or six weeks and it is difficult to tell which was the best. Perhaps that is because of the bird. There is good meat on it and once it has been done over with a knife and fork the small bones and carcass lend themselves to being picked over with fingers and teeth.

After all that perhaps worth finishing with a quote from the book I am reading on the moment:-

When things get too much for me, I put a wild-flower book and a couple of sandwiches in my pockets and go down to the South Shore of Staten Island and wander around awhile in one of the old cemeteries down there.

Joseph Mitchell –  it would be nice to do it as well as he does.

Last night Hugh and I went to see Admiral Fallow at The Kazimier in Liverpool. I am not sure that either of us were sure of what to expect and given the cold and thick rain I don’t think we would have been too disappointed if the other had decided not to go. So we were both pleasantly surprised.

I had picked up their last album Tree Bursts in Snow in June when we spent a few days in Edinburgh. I had never heard of them before but it had pride of place in Avalanche Records new home on Grassmarket so I thought I would give it ago. I have not listened to it as often as I should. It was probably overshadowed by The Dexy’s album which I picked up the same day. I was also discouraged by a review that mentioned Snow Patrol. I know very little about Snow Patrol apart from the all pervading Chasing Cars which the kids like to sing very loudly at inappropriate times – that is probably all the time – particularly when it comes to the kid with the loud voice.

I saw the poster advertising the gig in Probe Records when buying more albums that I can’t afford last week and didn’t think I would go. Then Hugh sent the email asking if anyone was interested so I said I would be up for it.

One of my favourite parts of a gig is watching an unknown band set up on stage and trying to get an inkling of what they might be like from the number of guitars and other instruments being subjected to the soundtrack. The guitars goes to one of my golden rules of a gig. The ideal should be no changes of guitar. As soon as they start being changed and swapped around points get knocked off. There were perhaps too many guitars last night but it was kept within reasonable limits. Other instruments included a flute, clarinet and an accordion. All these were good things although there was some Jethro Tull nervousness with the flute.

There was a definite Scottish timbre to the music which may be partly where the Snow Patrol reference had come from but King Creosote is from Scotland and there was some of that as well, particularly on the quieter moments. The flute and the clarinet wove round the back of the sound for most of the time and no one stood on one leg. There was some swapping of guitars but mostly between electric and acoustic so I could live with that.

Perhaps the best moment was when the whole band, six of them, came to the front of the stage to sing a song a cappella. There were loud bits as well and even some distorted guitars and tattoo beating of drums.

I was reminded of a review I had read a few days previously of the new album from God Speed You! Black Emperor.  We saw them in concert years ago and there were quiet bits then loud bits and then even louder bits and there was something redemptive about those loud bits, a great sense of release in the overpowering noise. The review noted all this and then noted that Coldplay now make a similar noise when they go loud, although not as good and with Chris Martin singing on top.

So no cooking last night and this evening and tomorrow I am out to see Mark Mulcahy. There will be a short report on that and on the partridge I am planning to eat with quince sauce on Friday.

There is some benefit in the clocks going back, winter is tightening around us and we have the benefit of warmth found, a newly made fire with chopped wood from the garden. It is getting dark just after 4.00 in the afternoon and I spent an hour outside as the afternoon merged into that winter glooming. The beds are a tangle of old and dead vegetation but as I pull and cut it away there are the first half shoots of next years growth.

In the last ten minutes or so before it got too dark to work it was quiet, just the sound of my breathing and the rustle of my hands in the dead leaves. It was still and there was a temptation to allow the time to stand still for a moment or two, to pause in my work and look up to the sky and close my eyes. Behind me a Robin turned the soil looking for food.

When it was finally dark I came in to make a late lunch. I had bought two medium chickens at the International Store, these were cut up into eight pieces, the carcasses put to one side for stock.  The chicken pieces were then fried off in olive oil until golden, a handful of peeled garlic cloves were thrown in and once they had taken on some colour I poured in a glass of white wine and some saffron water. Once that was simmering the lid was put on and it was left for forty minutes. About halfway through I stirred in some raisins and pine nuts.

Earlier in the day I had chopped up ten quinces, covered them with water and left them to simmer for a couple of hours.

Once they had collapsed into the water I forced them through a sieve and stirred a pound of sugar into the pulp.

We had the chicken with crusty rice flavoured with cardamon and cinnamon and flat bread that had been heated in the oven.

Th quince pulp has been put back on the oven and is bubbling slowly and volcanically. It is a deep dark red and the smell is starting to perfume the house.

Listening to Tom Waits and waiting for him to get to Kentucky Avenue.