I got delayed in the grocers this morning.

Kazim had just come back from four weeks in Iran and he had some videos on his iPhone to show me.

He had been staying in Tehran which he described as being one of the safest places in the world. Whilst he was there was a Shia festival as part of which everyone had cooked vast meals to give away to everyone else.

He had a video of men cooking in the basement of a mosque. There were a set of gas burners lined up against the walls and on each burner there was a vast steel pot. Some of them were filled with steamed rice being turned over with metal spoons to reveal the golden crust which had been made by placing layers of bread in oil on the bottom of the pan before the rice was layered on top to steam.

Other pans were filled with bright curry and there were others with split yellow peas. As the food was cooked it was spooned into plastic containers.

He had another film of upstairs in a community room where a queue of women were being handed the containers full of the food in the basement.

We talked about what a vast country Iran is. How on the coast they eat fish and samosas, foods that never make it inland to Tehran. And then the different ethnicities around the country including a people left over from when the mongols swept through the country.

He made it sound like a good country to visit and apparently they had five million tourists last year.

I bought dates and mushrooms and three yellowing pomegranates for their juice.

It is fair to say that I am not a great judge of distance when looking at a street map of London and working out how far I might have to walk.

Monday night I was staying at a hotel in Shoreditch on Hackney Road. Clerkenwell was on the previous page in the A-Z so I figured it wouldn’t be too far to walk and that I could therefore have myself a meal out in Morito. It transpires that the page and a half of map made up about two an a half miles that took me a good hour to walk.

There was some good graffiti on the way but is was a relief to stumble into Exmouth Market and its bright fairy lights and even more of a relief that there was one seat left in Morito where I could perch and look out onto the street. I was offered a glass of water but took a glass of beer instead to settle my weak legs and started to go through the menu.

I started with a small dish of beetroot borani, dill, feta and walnuts into which I dipped hunks of flat bread. The beetroot borani was not dissimilar to the beetroot I had cooked to go with Sunday lunch although the feta and walnuts gave it an added crunch.

I then moved onto a couple of salt cod croquettes with alioli. I had been thinking about these all week and they were worth the wait. If I get myself organised I may try and make some this weekend.

Having polished those off I was able to shift seats so I was sat in a corner from where I could look out over the street and look back across to the bar.

It was then onto a small carafe of red wine  and a plate of chipirones with sumac and alioli. These were baby squid no more than an inch long fried whole.

I decided to finish the meal off with a plate of chicharrones de cadiz with cumin and lemon. I had made these at home a few months ago. A slow cooked pork belly cut into bite sized squares and then fried. They were very good and so meltingly sticky that they made my teeth stick together.

That was meant to be the end of the meal but I needed something to cut through the richness of the pork so I had some malaga raisin ice cream which came drenched in sweet dark pedro ximenez. It seemed churlish not have a glass of pedro ximenez to with it.

One of the women behind the bar was fiddling with the iPod that was playing the music and so I found myself listening to what sounded like The Heptones although I wasn’t quite sure. It was tempting to stay on with another glass of the pedro ximinez to see if Party Time came on but it might not have been The Heptones and I could have ended up there all night. That might not have been a bad thing in some ways and would have made for a more interesting Tuesday morning.

As I paid my eye was caught by a stack of clean tea-towels they were selling so I got one of those as well. Apparently the first one they had sold.

There was more good graffiti on the walk back which took another hour. I managed to avoid being distracted by the neon lights for a striptease and a tobacco tasting station outside the hotel.

The tea-towel is in the kitchen waiting to get used. I will have to dig out The Heptones to listen to whilst I am using it.

It occurred to me whilst I was making it that the shepherd’s pie was in fact a cottage pie!

I had never really thought that there might be a difference but if I was using beef mince then perhaps it might not be a shepherd’s pie at all. But then was it as simple as saying that a shepherd’s pie was made out of minced lamb and a cottage pie out of beef.

Having made it and put it in the oven to cook I trawled through some of the books in the kitchen to see if there was any discussion to be had on the point. Rather to my surprise there wasn’t much to be found.

In fact there were no recipes for cottage pie. All I could find were recipes for shepherd’s pie were made out of lamb – either minced or leftover.

I was eventually able to find a recipe for cottage pie in a copy The Women’s Institute Book of pies and Puddings in which there is a whole chapter under the heading Shepherd’s and Cottage Pies.

The cottage pie was made from beef and had the bright suggestion of including some horseradish.

It was too late to include horseradish in the pie but I had cooked three plump beetroot last night. So I was able to dig up some horseradish from the garden (where it is growing like a weed), grate it until my eyes watered and then pureed it with a beetroot . A bright pink warming gloop to go with the cottage pie tonight.

Another second Sunday in the month so this morning I was back in New Ferry for Wirral Farmer’s Market.

There aren’t enough children at home for lunch tomorrow to justify a whole roast chicken but I bought one anyway to put in the freezer for next weekend. I was tempted by a the rabbits and a hare but we already have a couple of rabbits in the freezer waiting to be eaten and I suspect that somewhere towards the very bottom of the freezer there will be a plastic tub filled with stew that I made with the last hare that I bought about ten years ago.

All of which suggests that I need to undertake a good excavation of the freezer to unearth all the stuff that has been in there too long – like the occasional pigs foot I have bought just because it was there and you never know when you might need one.

Back in the Farmer’s Market I bought a bag of bloody mince for making a shepherd’s pie, some extra large carrots to go with the mince, beetroot, potatoes and onions, and two lamb leg steaks for lunch.

I fried the steaks for five minutes in hot oil seasoning as I went with salt and pepper. When they were done I tipped in a mixture of lemon zest, crushed garlic and sage leaves and then the juice of a lemon.

I ate them with small pieces of pasta.

Listening to The Go_Betweens.