Spend five minutes furtling around in the bottom of the freezer and there is usually a partridge to be found. I will buy one whenever I see them on sale and if there is no intention   to cook it immediately it will get squirrelled away for a Friday evening like tonight.

It was a particularly good one.

Having taken it out last night to defrost I spent twenty minutes leafing through various books to see if I could find a different way to cook it before again realising that keeping it simple would be best. So that meant roasting with some potatoes.

For the potato I cut it into rounds about half a finger thick. I then put these in the bottom of a small roasting dish in which I had melted some butter with a mixture of olive and groundnut oil on the stove. I left them to take on some colour giving them a turn every five minutes or so until they were almost cook through.

The oven then went on. I put the partridge on top of the potato and put some more pieces of butter on its breast and tucked a quartered red onion around.

That went into the oven for about 25 minutes. I basted it once. And as I think I may have mentioned it was very good.

For those who get down this far and are interested the new Doug Paisley album is almost as good as the the partridge. And with Garth Hudson on organ.