The weather has changed and now we have wind. Sometimes it blows so hard across the garden that we can feel the windows in the kitchen arch and bend in it. And we have rain as well. Proper rain coming in on vertical blasts over the lawn. All very good or the garden but a day to stay indoors.

Luckily we have friends coming over for a later Sunday lunch. The liquorice ice-cream was made for them. Although I didn’t stir it up with a fork enough times with a fork as it froze solid it doesn’t seem to have done too badly and is sitting now a frozen lump of umani in the freezer downstairs.

Before that we will have a roast chicken from the Farmer’s Market. Over the last few months my eye has been caught by various recipes involving chicken and preserved lemon. There has been a tub of preserved lemons in the fridge for the last year and as time has moved on I have become more conscious of the need to use them up.

Having bought my chicken and gone back over the recipes I had in mind I realised that they all involved a chicken chopped up as opposed to the whole one I had bought from the Market. Whilst it is a straightforward job to take apart a chicken with a sharp knife the ones from the market are so good it seems a shame to do so.

Accordingly it has been kept whole and has been stuffed with a mixture of preserved lemon, green olives, garlic, onion and harissa. It is sat downstairs as I write this taking in the flavours before being placed in a hot over for an hour or so to cook.

We will have it with crusty steamed rice cooked on a bed of pitta and a chopped vegetable salad.

And before that pinchos.

In the meantime we are listening to Luscious Jackson – slippy latino punk funk from twenty years ago – and one of the two artists has been busy and a cat has been getting too much attention.