The Nasi goreng was a great success.

One of the great pleasures to be had out of eating a roast chicken is picking it apart the next day to make a pile of the meat for leftover cooking. It is another cook’s perk. Yes you can pull off enough meat for what you require but there will always be some small nuggets left on the bone that will need to be nibbled away. All this involves much licking of fingers.

To the meat I add a couple of chopped cloves of garlic, slices of ginger, spring onions and chilli. Rice was made and put to one side.

I then heated a large wok and added a drop of ground nut oil. As this started to smoke I threw in a chopped onion. As this started soften and go golden at the edges the chicken was added and stirred quickly to heat through. I also threw in a couple of handfuls of cooked prawns. Once this was done the rice was stirred in. I continued to stir until it was all pipping hot.

I then turned the heat down for a minute whilst I cooked up two eggs. I heated a frying pan and added another drop of oil and tipped in two lightly whisked eggs making up a sort of flat omelette. Once this was done it was sliced and put on top of the rice.

It was all eaten with great gusto.

Afterwards we went to watch King Creosote. Nice to get out on a Sunday night before the Monday morning fag of being back at work. He played Bats in the Attic .

One of the things that caught my eye in the Diane Henry cookbook Food from Plenty I wrote about last week was a recipe for using up left over chicken or pork, Nasi goreng. It is a glorified stir fried rice. Before being able to cook it I would need some leftover chicken.

Normally when I go to The Farmer’s Market the chicken I buy is roasted for Sunday lunch and eaten with roast potatoes, carrots etc. This weekend I did something different and roasted it for supper on Saturday evening. In anticipation of where the leftovers were going I decided cook it with some Malaysian flavours as also suggested in the Diane Henry book.

This involved making a marinade with oyster sauce, soy sauce, sugar, garlic, ginger and chilli. This was smeared all over the chicken which was put away in the basement for a few hours.

I then roasted it on a lowish heat so as to make sure the sugar did not scorch. We ate it with white rice and stir fried green veg which included a sliced bitter gourd. The gourd was not as bitter as was anticipating but it added an interesting note to the meal. All the kids ate the chicken and one of them might even have said it was delicious.

There was plenty left over for the stir fry tonight.

Today we are listening to King Creosote as we are seeing him play tonight in Liverpool.

So I have just bought my third copy of The Writers & Artists Yearbook. This time it is the 2013 Edition. I first bought a copy about twenty-five years ago back when I won The Chester Poetry Society Annual prize and I thought there was money to be made in that. I then bought a further copy about five years ago when I started seriously on How to Kill a Mackerel and I thought I should do something about getting it published.

I can remember then feeling worn down by all the advice (and the hard work that would have to go with it) and it went back on the shelf and has hardly been looked at.

Since then I have had various pieces published in Fire & Knives and I have revisited parts of the book through writing this blog and, with the conversations I have had with the man with a dark beard, other pieces have been added. I was conscious that five years is probably a long time in publishing so I thought it worthwhile getting an up to date copy before setting course on trying to get at least some of it published.

I leafed through the yearbook last night and then same sensation of being worn down by the advice started to return. So I put the book to one side and started to write a proposal and give some thought to who might actually want to read a book about the killing and eating of mackerel and other beasts from the sea. We’ll see….

In the meantime this evening I am cooking a small pork shank. I bought it at Christmas and put it in the freezer and forgot about it. I came across it last night whilst rummaging around and reckoned that if I took it out to defrost I would think of a way to cook it over the day. It is in the oven on the moment resting on a bed of potato and apple, cider and garlic.

Galen and I will be eating it. It should be good.

It sounds like the rest of the weekend is going to be a battle between me and the family over what we listen to. Yesterday I invested in the new albums by Flaming Lips and The Knife.

The Flaming Lips made an album once that consisted of 4 CD’s that had to be played on 4 different machines at the same time. How good it sounded depended on how well you were able to sync up the four machines so each CD started at the same time. If I was to unkind you could say that the new one sounds like a playing of those 4 CD’s that has gone badly wrong. I think this is good. The family don’t and complain.

The Knife has lots of bits that sound like the bit in the middle of Echoes by Pink Floyd when the seagull noises start.

It should make for an interesting weekend.