Back in The Farmer’s Market on Saturday morning I spotted an enormous chicken on the stall on the right hand side as you walk in. The chickens I normally buy for Sunday lunch cost about £8.00. This was almost £17.00 and was the size of a small turkey. The man behind the stall saw me looking at it and suggested I could have it for £15.00. That was too good to resist. Mum & Dad were coming for lunch on Sunday and this would feed us all and as the man said it would keep us in sandwiches for the week.

Midday on Sunday I took it out of the fridge and gave it a rub down with olive oil, salt pepper and paprika and shoved an onion up its backside. I didn’t get round to looking at how much it weighed but reckoned on it needing a good couple of hours to cook.

It was going to be a late lunch so just after 3.00 I put the oven on high and slipped it in. It was cooking fiercely after an hour and I piled up potatoes around it turning them in the fat and lowering the heat.

Five o’clock and one of the legs pulled away easily. I took the bird out of the pan and put it on a large plate to rest covered with a piece of tin foil and a tea-towel.

The oven went back to high and I put the potatoes back in stirring into them some chopped red pepper, red onion and garlic. Fifteen minutes later the potatoes had started to crisp up and the peppers were soft. I piled them around the chicken. We ate it with thick carrots that had been cooked with butter crushed cumin seeds and honey.

For a pudding I was determined to make use of some of the large apples from the garden. I peeled and quartered six large ones and put them into the hot oven covered with a thin layer of brown sugar. By the time we had finished on the chicken the apples had started to collapse in on themselves.

I poured whipped cream in a large flat whit bowl and spooned the apples on top. Rather to my surprise the kids ate it as well.  Probably all the sugar.

There was plenty of chicken left. Stock has been made and this evening I had a chicken salad all to myself. I used up the last ten tomatoes from the greenhouse and the last padron pepper which had turned red. These were chopped and stirred into the chicken together with half a sliced onion, mint, parsley and half a tub of Greek yogurt.

There is more chicken left for a pungent Vietnamese stir fry tomorrow night. We will see how the kids do with that.

Sadly Miriam and her story of burnt mackerel did not win this evening but it is in the book of the shortlisted writers so that is a start. Considering the story was cobbled together from a couple of posts on here in an evening before going away in the summer it did well to get where it did.

I was by far the oldest there this evening and I got the impression that at least some of the other writers had a slightly more professional aspect to their writing.There were ten shortlisted writers in all and we were gathered together with our respective supporters (thank you Bridget & Steve – no thanks to kids who all had better things to do and no doubt are still off enjoying themselves).

We were in The Anthony Burgess Foundation and we were able to have a glass of Enderby Pale Ale which was very good.

After an introduction and a reading of poems and a short story we were into the countdown to the winner. The tension was ramped up by them having five consolation prizes. These were an e-reader of some sort. So just as well I didn’t win one of those as the fights at home with one of those in house would have the potential to be fatal.

The consolation prizes out of the way meant there were five names in the hat for the winner. As I have said it was not me. So I now know what they feel like at the Oscars and can put a fixed grin on like the next guy.

So the celebratory bottle of red wine I pulled out of a cupboard earlier in the day has turned itself into the evenings consolation prize. I will have it with a partridge that has spent 40 minutes roasting in the oven. For half that time it has been accompanied by a couple of apples from the garden, peeled cored and chopped up. They have now disintegrated and have been stirred into the juices and fat given off by the bird.

A recipe adapted from Patience Gray’s Honey from a Weed.

Before finishing I should mention two things. The post bought me this morning a copy of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing. He is the master of less is more. They are rules to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book. Sounds like something to live by.

Second thing; lunch today was a small rack of mutton from the farmer’s market in New Ferry. And very good it was to.

Listening to Bob Dylan and The Band. May go on to Orange Juice.

It has been quiet here for the last few days. This is mostly because a large part of the week was spent down in London.

The last time I spent an evening in London I ate delicious but expensive tapas at Barrafina and went to watch Dexy’s play in an old theatre in the West End.

So this week operated as something of a contrast.

I arrived at Euston late on Tuesday afternoon and was whisked off to The Britannia Bar overlooking the concourse to meet my companions for the next 48 hours. Having snuggled my way into a pint of Golden IPA we left to make our way to Barking. We had been booked into the Ibis Hotel there and so with thoughts of Billy Bragg we set off.

There is great benefit to be had from living in Liverpool which is a city that has seen its population shrink around the infrastructure that was created a hundred years ago. A five minute hold up through a set of lights is the worse that you may have to put up with on a drive home in the evening.

Barking is apparently just over eight miles from Euston. On Tuesday night that journey took us an hour an half in the back of a car. It was a grinding slow drive leavened by the diversity of the areas we crawled through, the sheer rough complexity of London moving past slowly beyond the back windows of the car.

It was dark by the time we got on to the three lane dual carriageway that was Barking. The sat-nav took us to the door of The Ibis and we spilled out ready for another beer and something to eat.

All our spirits were dashed as we crowded into the reception area and we looked around us. It appeared that our only options for food for the night was going to be a set of shelves filled with Pot Noodles and Mars Bars and the bar was a fridge stacked with cider and Carling. Fortunately it transpired the sat-nav had taken us to the wrong Ibis. There was a slightly posher version three hundred yards and a Travel-Lodge up the road. We turned the sat-nav back on and motored across.

The second Ibis was a great deal posher than the first in that it had a bar and offered the promise of food. We booked in, changed and met in the bar. The choice was limited to Guinness but that was okay and I tucked in.

Having looked at the menu I chose Prawn Cocktail and steak. What could go wrong. To start with there was only one steak left and two of us had ordered it. I gave way and went for a burger instead. In the event it transpired that that was wrong to. The steak that arrived after a warm prawn-cocktail was more like a third of a steak and had been cooked in a way that banished from it anything that might give the impression this could taste good.

The next night we cruised the streets of Barking to find something better and ended up in the Weatherspoons next to the tube. This time they did have steak and the piece that arrived on my plate was about five times the size of the thing that that had been served up the previous evening. They had good beer as well and I squeezed in a couple of pints of Scapa Special.

The evening was rounded off with a talk on tomatoes and greenhouses and the merits of Rossendale of which there are many!

Sunday afternoon whilst planting the garlic our lunch was cooking.

I made a thick coconut flavoured Indonesian curry. It was very straightforward and was a dish that was happiest being left on its own to cook whilst I got on with other things which included nibbling at some sweet crispy crabs.

The recipe came from a book on Indonesian cooking that I picked up years ago. It was a chicken rendang. It is similar to a beef rendang save that the sauce is left to cook for an hour before adding the chicken.

The sauce was six cans of coconut milk, chopped onion, garlic, galingale and chilli, lots of turmeric, a couple of bay leaves, a bruised piece of lemon grass and salt. All this was put into a large pot and brought to a slow boil and then left to simmer until it had started to reduce. I then added the pieces of chicken and some thick tamarind water and left it all to cook for another hour and a bit.

At this point the sauce should separate into the oil from the coconut and the rest. You should then turn the heat up and continue stirring so that oil is absorbed by the meat and the sediment.

I did a bit of that but time was running out and the kids were hungry so we ate it with rice before all the oil had been absorbed.

The vegetarian alternative was easy to make by putting some of the sauce to one side before adding the chicken and stirring in a chopped aubergine and a tin of chickpeas.

There was plenty left for this evening and it was better second night in. In reheating the oil was absorbed and the whole dish took on a nutty flavour as if I had stirred in a half jar of smooth peanut butter.