One of the disadvantages of being a periodic maker of pizza dough is never being able to remember how you got it right last time.

I make pizza for the family about once every six weeks and sometimes it works and sometimes it could have been better. There is never any great consistency in how I go about making it and certainly no measuring of ingredients.

Last nights dough worked particularly well so here is an attempt to record what was done.

I started with about one pound of strong white flour into which I added a good table spoon of crushed sea salt and two tablespoons of Total Greek yogurt.

For the yeast I poured a sachet of dried yeast into about a pint of warm water and stirred in a couple of table spoons of honey.

I then stirred the water with its yeast and honey into the flour and started to mix it around with my fingers. It was very sticky to start so I added more flour as I went along until I got to a kneadable mass.

When kneading bread I time myself to the music I am listening to. Last night I kneaded through the first couple of songs on John Grant’s Queen of Denmark.

Halfway through the kneading I added some olive oil pouring a good glug into a well I had made in the dough and then working it in as I carried on kneading.

Once the two songs were finished I tipped the dough into a bowl and lubricated it with some more oil. It was then left for a couple of hours on a warm floor.

Forty mintes or so before eating I took enough of the dough to roll it out flat onto a large baking tray. That was kept warm for half an hour whilst I sweated onions and garlic with a tin of chopped tomatoes. The oven was put on full heat.

Ten minutes before eating I smeared the tomato sauce over the pizza and then added some thick rounds of salami and a generous handful of mozzarella cheese. More oil and plenty of salt and pepper went on for seasoning and it all went into the very hot oven.

Whilst it cooked I showered and picked out a bright orange jacket for John Grant.

It came out of the oven blistered and hot and just as a good pizza should be.We will have to see if I can make it again.

John Grant was brilliant. He played for a couple of hours and I think everyone in the Phil would have been quite content for him to have gone on for another hour or so. I think he liked the jacket.

I spent a couple of hours this morning in Anfield at Homebaked moving around some history.

Although downstairs is now a functioning bakery selling bread, pies and very good sausage rolls, upstairs is still as it was thirty years ago with added layers of dust and clutter. The intention is in due course it will be turned into good living accommodation – and what could be better than living upstairs of a bakery.

But before that work can started we needed to clear out some of the stuff up there so skips were ordered and I was there at 9.30 this morning with a pair of old gardening gloves to help shift some rubbish.

A lot of it was rubbish, broken chairs and window frames and pieces of glass, half empty paint tins, odd bits of metal, a box a dried yeast twenty fine years past its use by date, damp curtains, pieces of wood and more pieces of metal. There were boxes of old baking magazines and I had to resist the temptation to take those home to be read later.

In one room we found an old family bible that looked as it could have been as old as the hundred year old dust that billowed up from the linoleum that we pulled up from the floor. There were old counters that had to be broken apart before we could get them downstairs and leaning against a wall a large trough that was about 10 feet long and three feet long. All it need was a lid and it would have made a good coffin.

We left for another day the shelves stacked with old baking tins.

Most of them were black with rust and stuck solid together. There were all shapes and sizes. Some of the big ones looking large enough for the giant that could have fitted into the flour trough.

I was able to bring some of them home and they are now in the basement waiting for me to find something useful to do with them.

I rescued from the skip what looked a set of moulds for Easter eggs wrapped in copies of the Liverpool Echo dated 19 March 1965.

Back at home I made some dough for pizzas to eat before we go see John Grant this evening.

Son thought that getting into college for his Art Foundation Course next year would be a shoe in but it still felt like a good excuse for us to share some steak and chips.

A good plate of steak and chips is almost one of my favourite meals. I am not actually sure what the favourite meal would in fact be; some days it could be a half tin of cold Heinz Baked Beans eaten out of the tin with with a fork and on others a bacon sandwich with brown sauce, or mackerel cooked less than an hour after being hauled out of the sea over an open flame

But if I am sat in a restaurant and struggling to make a choice I will invariably go for the steak and chips. And if I am at home with the son and need to make something for us to eat then there is not much that goes down better.

So that is what we had this evening although it turned out the interview was not quite the expected shoe in.

Half way through I got a phone call from son wanting clarification as to what grade he got for his English Language GCSE. He had managed to convince himself that he had done no better than an E which meant that despite the excellent art he would be off making his way in life as a life-guard. I, of course, had no idea what grade he got but felt confident that it was along the lines of a C. He went back into the interview armed with this new information and all was sweetness and light and a place was offered.

I picked up the two steaks on the way home. Pepper corns were crushed and rubbed in and they were scorched each side for a few minutes in a very hot pan. Whilst they rested some of the last strong alcohol I could find in the basement was flamed and cream was stirred in before before being poured over the steaks.

They were very good.

I sat out the interview in The Belvedere pub with a pint. I was the youngest person in there. Probably just as well it is not round the corner. I would be there every night almost as old as all the others waiting out their time.

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.