Saturday morning and getting my head around the food for Sunday all I could think about was the fact we had too much Sumac in the house.

I am reasonably sure that the first time I heard about Sumac was watching one of the early Nigella Lawson programmes on the TV, back when she was good. I bought some then and now if I see some in a shop I will buy it again just so I don’t run out.

But for the last few months there has been a packet on the side waiting to get opened and so today we had a go at it.

The International Store was selling chickens with feet on. The man behind the counter offered to chop them up for me but I reckoned that I had knives as sharp as his.

I found the cleaver and cut two chickens into four pieces each.

A large metal tin then went on the oven and the chicken pieces were turned in the hot oil until they started to take on some colour.

As the chicken was done it was taken out of the pan and replaced with a mixture of onions, spring onions and garlic. The Sumac was stirred in and as the onions wilted the chicken was put back on top with a generous grinding of pepper salt and more of the Sumac.

We ate it half an hour later with salad and yogurt and roast potatoes.

To my surprise the first impression I got from the day was how important it was to get it right in terms of who you were going into the venture with.

Maybe this came down to the contrast between the experiences of the first two speakers.

First person on was the man from Higgidy. They had started as a group of three friends – one of them doing the pie making and the other two helping out. Two out of the three had got married and they were all still working together after how many years of doing it.

There was time for questiomns and someone asked about the dynamic between the three of them and what difficulties there might have been. That was then my note-book came out for the first time ‘friendship, partnersip and tension’ I scribbled.

The next speaker was a Camilla Barnard from a company called Rude Health which had started out by making a particularly good type of muesli and then moved onto other things including porridge and cereal like snacks. The genesis of the business had come about when she and her husband and their neighbours had gathered round a kitchen table and tried to work out how to make a muesli they all liked. They came up with something and the business was up and running. She then turned the talk round the question that had been asked as to the difficulties in starting a business with friends and said that the neighbours were no longer part of the business and they were no longer friends.

Next up was the lady from Planet Organic, Renée Elliot. She talked about some of her partners and mentioned the 18 months worth of litigation that followed on her falling out with one of.

Jimmy who made and sold the chilled coffee had started in the business with his sister and it was clear that she was still very much part of it all but kept in the background.

It transpired that the two lads who had the pizza business, Pizza Pilgrims, when they were asked the question as to whether there had been any testing of their friendship working together, they were brothers.

They were on stage together but the others were there by themselves but the clear impression was given, and I think someone may even have said it, you can’t do these things on your own. It is important to have people there with you as part of the business. But you have to trust those people otherwise you run the risk of a bad falling out.

It has been a cold bleak blustery Saturday and lunch needed to be warm and comforting – so we had curried parsnip soup out of Jane Grigson’s Good Things.

Four fat parsnips peeled and chopped into chunks and cooked slowly in butter with a chopped onion and some garlic until the parsnips had started to soften and had soaked up some of the butter.

They were seasoned with salt and pepper and a generous helping of mild curry powder and then covered in some half decent vegetable stock, brought to a simmer, and left to cook for forty minutes or so.

They went through the Magimix and we ate the soup with the remains of the bread from Thursday’s bread circle.

Listening to the new album by Natalie Prass.

So even before I get to start on my list of eight top tips to come out of Sunday’s course I have had a tweet telling me about a property in Oxton that has some sort of potential as a cheese cave.

I drove past on the way back from work this evening in a heavy wind with gobs of rain blowing me along so I didn’t really have a chance to see what I was looking at but I will give it a better go tomorrow and maybe put a call through to see if I can have a look around it.

God knows what  I will do if it is anything like suitable!

Ten years ago I went so far as to start looking at properties and even found one that was halfway towards being something that could have been worked with. It was an old garage which for reasons obscure had become a ship chandler. There was space and a wide double door giving access to a covered yard to the rear. But it was a hundred yards out of the way and riddled with asbestos and expense and so it went onto the pile of things to dream and the forget about.

Now that it has been remembered the things I need to think about are:-

1. How to go about getting all the good Irish Cheese back to Birkenhead;

2. Finding somewhere to sell it from;

3. And are there enough people in Birkenhead who can be persuaded to buy the good Irish Cheese.

Those three things and the eight pointers I took down from the weekend.