Last weekend in The Observer magazine Jay Rayner wrote a review of some restaurant in London that was doing nothing else but roast chicken and still managing to get it wrong.

It reminded me of a restaurant we went to in Madrid years ago that did nothing but roast chicken and cider. Of course this was no good for the vegetarian amongst us but she was reassured that they did great chips and she would be able to fill herself on those. However something got lost in the translation and the chips arrived in a plastic packet and there was an embarrassed silence for a couple of minutes whilst we digested the fact that some of us were going to eat a half chicken on a plate and one of us was going to eat a packet of crisps.

Sometimes I think I am still getting over that evening.

In the same article Jay Rayner let out that his favourite way of roasting a chicken was to spatchcock it, smear it in garlic and lemon juice, throw on some fennel seeds and olive oil, and put it in a hot oven for an hour.

What he didn’t warn against was smearing the garlic in with your hands after having spent an hour in the garden wielding a pair of secateurs against all the ivy so that I was left with a couple of burst blisters. The garlic got in under the blisters and it has been a while since I have felt such focussed and intense pain.

We had the chicken this evening and he was right. Two of us were there ready to tear it apart with our fingers.

We ate it with rice cooked on the basis of the the half recommendation from Kazim yesterday.

Soak good rice for an hour. Drain. Boil water. Add rice to water and cook for about four minutes. Drain rice. Melt butter in bottom of pan. Split a pitta and place over the melted butter. Tip rice back in the pan slowly. Put on very low heat with a tea-towel under the lid. After about half an hour the bread will be crisp and the rice perfect.

As for the chicken “spatchcock it so it’s flat and toadlike, then heap on fennel seeds, lots of crushed garlic, salt, olive oil and the juice of one lemon. Roast that on high for an hour.”

All good cooking should be capable of being distilled down to a few words.

Listening to Sleater Kinney. There was a time when the two best best bands in the world were a three piece and a four piece – all women. Sleater Kinney were the three piece.

Almost twenty years ago when we moved to Liverpool about the only place to eat in the city was Pizza Express on Victoria Street. The Pizza Express is still there but there are a lot more places to go get something to eat. The only problem on a Saturday evening is finding a table.

Last night three of us ended up in Slim’s Chop Express on Seel Street having been halfway down and back up again Bold Street looking for for somewhere that would have us.

We ate and drank well. Short beef ribs that had been slow cooked for seven hours, prawns, a pulled pork burger and chips, lots of salty chips. I enjoyed myself working out what music was playing and drinking beer.

The beer was Beavertown Gamma Ray American Pale Ale and came in a multi coloured can. It was the second good beer I had drunk out of a can over the course of the last couple of weeks. Lets hope that the beer I am about to start brewing in the basement tastes half as good.

Half inspired by the food from last night I have rescued a piece of smoked gammon that has been lurking in the bottom of the freezer since a Christmas about three years ago. It is now bubbling gently in a couple of litres of Coke courtesy of a recipe by Nigella for White Trash Ham. It should make good sandwiches for the week.

And that is a picture of the the last rose we had growing in the garden.

There was plenty of good bread left over from Thursday evenings delivery from the Bread Circle so we turned some of it into toast and had bruschetta for lunch.

Te was easy to make. Half a chopped red onion, some squashed garlic, one grated tomato and two finely chopped tomatoes then olive oil and plenty of salt and pepper – all mixed together.

We ate it with mushrooms fried in oil, some sliced lamb and four lamb kidneys cooked so they were still pink in the centre. Ideally the kidneys should of had some sherry with them but there isn’t an open bottle in the house.

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.