A large part of the morning was spent shaking off the blurred edges from the Salopian Oracle drunk last night in Gallagher’s Pub whilst listening to all the excellent swearing on John Grant’s Pale Green Ghosts. We all need some more swearing in our lives.

Over lunch I was reminded of my English grandmother as I went into Waterstones to leaf through some cookbooks to find something to make for my supper.

I went straight to Claudia Roden’s book on Spanish cooking and reminded myself of her recipe for a lamb stew with the honey. That would do and I made a mental note of what I would need to buy on the way home. I kicked myself for not having stopped off at Edge’s on the way into work to buy some lamb rather than having to rely on the best that Sainsbury was going to have available.

After that I went into Probe and resisted the temptation to buy some more music. It is record shop day tomorrow and I will have to go back and join the queue.

But the highlight of lunch was walking into a new shop down past Liverpool 1, Cow & Co, and being asked if I was ‘the writer’ on the back of a tweet and an article about mackerel in Fire & Knives. There seemed to be some symmetry in me having written about the things that I think about over a lunch spent walking round Liverpool and there being a shop in Liverpool come across over lunch selling a magazine with the same article in it.

The lamb stew is cooking now and we are listening to King Creosote and looking out for bats as the sun goes down.

I wrote some months ago about defenestration. I started the process on my book about mackerel and then put it to one side. Well I have opened the window again.

The expression comes from a book about Katherine Hepburn. Some years ago we spent New Year’s Even in Kent. There was a lot of driving both to get down there and then on trips out to Whitstable, Romney Marsh, Dungeness and thereabouts. As we drove we listened to an audio book about her. A lot of it was was descriptions of long conversations that the writer had with Katherine Hepburn about life and her life. At one point the writer talked about a book he was writing a problems he was having trying to conclude it. ‘Defenestrate,’ she said. Open a window and throw it all out then start all over again.

I am not throwing it all out of the window but I am taking apart the pages and putting them back together again in a different order with bits of odd conversation with the man with a black beard thrown in for good measure.

I am quite enjoying it so far but let’s see if that lasts when I sit down to reread it and remind myself of the rewriting that needs to be done.

The Nasi goreng was a great success.

One of the great pleasures to be had out of eating a roast chicken is picking it apart the next day to make a pile of the meat for leftover cooking. It is another cook’s perk. Yes you can pull off enough meat for what you require but there will always be some small nuggets left on the bone that will need to be nibbled away. All this involves much licking of fingers.

To the meat I add a couple of chopped cloves of garlic, slices of ginger, spring onions and chilli. Rice was made and put to one side.

I then heated a large wok and added a drop of ground nut oil. As this started to smoke I threw in a chopped onion. As this started soften and go golden at the edges the chicken was added and stirred quickly to heat through. I also threw in a couple of handfuls of cooked prawns. Once this was done the rice was stirred in. I continued to stir until it was all pipping hot.

I then turned the heat down for a minute whilst I cooked up two eggs. I heated a frying pan and added another drop of oil and tipped in two lightly whisked eggs making up a sort of flat omelette. Once this was done it was sliced and put on top of the rice.

It was all eaten with great gusto.

Afterwards we went to watch King Creosote. Nice to get out on a Sunday night before the Monday morning fag of being back at work. He played Bats in the Attic .

One of the things that caught my eye in the Diane Henry cookbook Food from Plenty I wrote about last week was a recipe for using up left over chicken or pork, Nasi goreng. It is a glorified stir fried rice. Before being able to cook it I would need some leftover chicken.

Normally when I go to The Farmer’s Market the chicken I buy is roasted for Sunday lunch and eaten with roast potatoes, carrots etc. This weekend I did something different and roasted it for supper on Saturday evening. In anticipation of where the leftovers were going I decided cook it with some Malaysian flavours as also suggested in the Diane Henry book.

This involved making a marinade with oyster sauce, soy sauce, sugar, garlic, ginger and chilli. This was smeared all over the chicken which was put away in the basement for a few hours.

I then roasted it on a lowish heat so as to make sure the sugar did not scorch. We ate it with white rice and stir fried green veg which included a sliced bitter gourd. The gourd was not as bitter as was anticipating but it added an interesting note to the meal. All the kids ate the chicken and one of them might even have said it was delicious.

There was plenty left over for the stir fry tonight.

Today we are listening to King Creosote as we are seeing him play tonight in Liverpool.