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.

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.