Torta Pasqualina

Easter Egg Pie

Easter is all about celebrating spring and new life and the return of light and colour to the world after the bleakness and chill of a long dark winter. With four days off it's celebrated in a proper way, with time to make plans and do stuff and eat well. And eggs, of course. Easter is definitely about the eggs.

I had been vaguely thinking of roasting some lamb for the weekend, gently spiced perhaps with lots of roasted veg with plenty of meat leftover to add to butter bean mash and roasted peppers all the better to stuff wraps for easy eating. Not very eggy, tis true but definitely spring like. Then I read about this Italian Easter Pie and it stirred a vague memory of wanting to try it once and never getting round to it. I am a big fan of eggs whichever way you serve them and I was really taken with the idea of  the richish leafy cheese base studded with whole eggs before baking. I have signed up for a weekly veg box and this week there was spinach and spring onions amongst the treasure as well as radish and carrots for a crunchy salad. Perhaps the time had come.

In its original form it is a slightly complex construction with a lot of recipes assuming you will make the filo pastry. Seriously! They sell it ready made - rolled, boxed, frozen - in all good supermarkets and specialist food shops. For the true afficionado there should be 33 sheets of it, one for each year of Christ's life, plus a dozen eggs inserted, one for each of the apostles. I decided to simplify that bit of it too, but I definitely kept to the spirit of the pie and I'm glad to say it turned out beautifully.

In Italy it is made and served at the Easter Monday picnic - love the assumption that of course you will picnic on your day off. With all the eggs and greens and herby freshness this is a good dish for the whole of spring, I think, not just an Easter treat.

Torta Pasqualina

I used tarragon in the mix because I had some that needed using and it worked a treat though most recipes suggest marjoram and/or parsley,

25g dried mushrooms
1kg fresh spinach, big stalks discarded
50 butter
1 bunch spring onions, green and white parts chopped into small rings
1 tablespoon chopped tarragon - or marjoram or parsley
250g fresh ricotta
100g Parmesan, finely grated
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg, freshly grated
8 eggs
Generous quantities of salt and pepper
250g packet filo pastry
2 tablespoons olive oil

Soak the dried mushrooms in boiling water for 20 minutes or so until they have softened. Drain and discard the soaking water.

Wash the spinach in plenty of cold water numerous times until all the dirt is gone. Melt half the butter in a large pan and add the still wet spinach, cover with a lid and turn the heat down. After a couple of minutes give it a stir to help it wilt and collapse then drain in a colander and allow to cool. Working with one small handful at a time, squeeze the excess liquid from the spinach then chop roughly. Put all the chopped spinach into a big bowl.

Melt the rest of the butter in the pan and add the mushrooms, frying for a few minutes till they take on the richness of the butter. Allow to cool a bit then chop the mushrooms finely and add them to the chopped spinach along with the spring onions, tarragon, ricotta, two thirds of the grated Parmesan, the nutmeg and 2 eggs and mix the lot into a rich green creamy slurry. Season generously.

Grease a 30cm spring form cake tin with a little olive oil then start to layer with a couple of sheets of filo, brushing each sheet with olive oil as you go. After 4 layers of pastry spoon in the spinach mixture then make six deep indentations with the back of a spoon. Carefully crack an egg and drop it into the first hole without breaking the yolk then do it five more times with the rest of the eggs till all the indentations are filled. Sprinkle the rest of the Parmesan over the yolks.

Gently cover the pie with the next sheet of filo, brush it with oil and continue till all the pastry is used, brushing the top with a good quantity of oil so that the pie will crisp up while it cooks.

Heat the oven to 180C and cook the pie for about an hour, till the filling is richly fragrant and the pastry is golden. Take it out of the oven and put it onto a wire rack, then carefully undo the catch on the spring form and take the outer circle off. Let the pie cool a bit - or completely - and serve with salad.

Lunch at Noma

On Friday last week the man and I had lunch at Noma with the lovely J& M - even typing 'had lunch at Noma' sounds unlikely. But so very true... It's an ambition we've chatted about for a very long time - I did think for a while it would simply be a tantalising dream forever unrealised. But things happen and sometimes dreams come true.

Fast forward to a sunny day in Copenhagen, perfect for a stroll down to the water where Noma is housed in an old warehouse. We stepped down into a beautifully understated room and a whole crowd of staff smiling and greeting us, including the extraordinary chef Rene Redzepi. Was astounded to find him there for service. It was the beginning of the thrill that lasted for the next four hours of intensely flavoured food, all of it beautifully plated and explained with great detail by a profusion of charming and well informed staff. I felt incredibly welcome to be there, that everyone was as delighted as us at the prospect of lunch.

There were about 20 courses in all.

We started with champagne - why not? - to accompany a quick succession of glorious little dishes to share. First was Nordic coconut, big fat green kohlrabi that had been hollowed out then filled with a juice mix of crushed unripe strawberries and sea buckthorn, brightly cleansing and vaguely orangey all sucked up through a straw made from one of the stems. This was fun.

There was a vase in the centre of the table with a display of small branches and flowers - pretty but it did seem slightly out of place. There are no tablecloths in sight, soft light spills in all around through the enormous windows, the room is a palely beautiful thing of various soft greys and the staff, too, wear muted shades of grey. A couple of small dishes of home made creme fraiche were set before us - to be used to dip the centre branches of our floral display. Seriously, the branches. They were malt bread fern frond cut outs coated in a fine juniper dust, tasting almost bitter and very dry when I curiously nibbled the end. Hmmm, Nordic I thought, then I dipped it into the creme fraiche and it was silky and intense - ah, wonderful, I thought.

Next was one of my favourite things - moss and cep. Reindeer moss explained the waiter, with a shaving of dried cep. The moss was how I imagine a cloud would be if briefly deep fried - tiny delicate strands of crisp, sort of there and not there, the cep adding a very slight dusting of earthy - a really lovely dish.

After moss there was a triumph of culinary skill - verdantly green pea pods where the inside had been peeled and removed and the remaining fine skin stuffed with peas, pine and chamomile. One each and they were pea perfection. (We had a tour of the kitchens after lunch and saw the  young stager intently peeling a large bowl of pea pods for the evening service, least favourite job in the kitchen by all accounts though he, like everyone else, was remarkably cheerful in his diligence.)

Peas eaten, we were presented with a battered old biscuit tin, the lid off to reveal little tin flan cases - mostly empty I'm sad to report - but the four that weren't had a perfect disc of deeply savoury cheese biscuit topped with the stems of rocket chopped fine to the size of match heads - a glorious mouthful of both flavour and texture. Then there was berry and roses that tasted like the best wine gums the world will ever know followed by a large speckled egg that opened with a whisp of smoke to reveal tiny pickled and smoked warm quail's eggs nestling in a pile of straw.

Next was one of my favourite things - though the degrees of separataion between loving it and favourite are miniscule - this is one that really amazed me. It was a sheet of caramelised milk - ie milk (skin?) that has been reduced down till it is no longer liquid and has formed a thin golden sheet - topped with small, noticeably cold, discs of cod liver the size of a one penny piece that melted into a decadent richness on my tongue. Heaven.

It was followed by a dish that made us laugh out loud as it was set down. Imagine warm fat beignets the size of golfballs, stuffed with cucumber jelly and stuck through with smoked baby herring, head poking out one side, tail the other. It was our very own plate of stargazy donuts! I'm not generally a fan of little fish still with their heads and tails but these were very yum indeed.

Following the couple of fish dishes was a lovely clean tasting sorrel and nasturtium plate, the sorrel leaves stood like sails at the edge of the bowl, to be used to scoop up a sort of grainy nasturtium sea. And then big fat crayfish warm and split, with juicy claws and a small bowl of something indescribably wonderful to dip into. I still don't know what it was.

The final starter - yes, we are still on the introduction to the meal - was a big fat burnt leek set before us with a waft of barbecue. Our Australian waiter - who was in fact one of the sous chefs as some of the dishes are served by the kitchen staff to add extra depth to explanations making the meal ever more seamless - laughingly suggested the chef could use a few more lessons on cooking over coals. It was the interior we ate - the leeks had been hollowed out then filled with short lengths of baby leek with a creamy cod roe - all of it smokily steamed to melting perfection inside the big leek.

You will no doubt have noticed by now that I wasn't taking lots of photos despite the incredible wit and beauty of every dish. For me it interrupts the pleasure of eating, metaphorically taking me away from the table and I seriously wanted to be immersed in this lunch entirely. Apologies if you miss them. I did, however, take a few...

This was the first of the main courses. Up to this point all the plates had come in really quick succession and were placed in the middle of the table for sharing. This exquisite looking plate was all mine! I will admit I half expected a fat green frog to emerge from under one of these pretty lily pads but no - what we had was raw Skagen shrimp and ramsons, with rhubarb root and flowers and it tasted as delicately beautiful as that bowl looks.

The next plate was thin slices of scallop that had been dried to almost crisp served on grains - barley I think with the peppery bite of watercress and a slight oily crunch of hazelnuts all of it in a coal black slick of squid ink. It stained under my fingernails as I tried to mop up every last drop.

Next up was a deceptively simple looking dish, a medley of soft browns amid translucence - shards of roasted onions and slices of fermented pears - with a scattering of black flecks. The flecks were black ant sauce, said our waiter. We glanced at each other briefly, quick shrug, then tucked right in. Allow me to recommend ant sauce next time you are serving onions with fermented pear.

Possibly the most Nordic looking dish so far followed. Asparagus - a thing I love - here was served with the white stalks roasted, the green pureed and served with cream and pine twice - once for eating, which were the fine pale green new shoots about a centimetre long alongside little branches, there just for decoration.

Next was potato and bleak fish roe. The potato had been rolled in a kind of mould or fungus then roasted - they looked like the chestnuts that get sold round the streets in winter. They were very earthy - I'll admit I was not entirely sure. The bleak fish can find solace at least in the fabulousness of the tiny quenelles of roe that were served alongside, yet another version of wonderful.

Hidden within this beautiful symphony of white and deep green above is a little package of pike perch wrapped in cabbage, grilled to make for richness and delicacy together.  The leaves poking out are verbena and there is a little dill in there too - the whole dish was light as the foam on top, all of it gone in moments.

The empty plates were taken away and replaced with this beef rib. One each.

It was the very last of the savoury dishes and was so beautiful to look at. The ribs are cooked for a week, hence the expanse of clean bone, then topped with lingon berries, tiny tart juicy little fruits that I first ate with J& M one Christmas, my first taste of Sweden. I loved this dish, the incredibly tender meat was richly flavoured and the sharp crisp topping - which looks to me like Christmas on the bone - was perfect with it. We ate it with our hands, no cutlery provided, somehow increasing the pleasure.

Dessert first was gammel dansk, a bitter herbal liqueur made into sort of crisp shards served with a little pile of herbs and toasted bits, very sharp and clean. And lastly, rhubarb and milk with brown cheese and oxalis. (My mother weeds oxalis from her garden in a frenzy every time it pops up) Despite the way it reads this came out looking like a Danish pastry, crowned with a slick of 'chocolate' disc and lovely with it.

And then it was - not quite - over. We were taken through to the bar on the other side for coffee and amazing chocolate crunchy things, utterly blissed out with the pleasure of such an extraordinary meal, chattering happily for the next half hour or so.

This charming woman was one of the many that served us - she was such delightful fun all day

Having written all about it I am left with the sense that I have an insufficiency of language to describe just how much I enjoyed our meal at Noma, the sheer giddy enchantment of it. What can I say?

Go if you can.

Honeyed Pigeon and Beetroot Salad

The weather has much improved, and though it's not exactly hot out I decided this week it was time for salad. Really wanted that fabulous melange of flavours and textures that a good salad delivers. Too cold yet for great tomatoes or cucumber I wondered about a warm salad, using tiny potatoes and earthy beetroot. Nuts of course, and garlic crumbs as I seem to have accumulated bits and pieces and ends of loaves and do love the way they fry up to gorgeous. Thought about it for a bit longer then set my heart on pigeon. No idea why - the challenge of cooking something new perhaps, and the swiftness with which they're done has a definite appeal. Robust rather than delicate I figured they would be a good match for the rest of the plate.

I had a jar of Sarah's Wonderful Blueberry Honey, a new Irish product kindly sent to me by Bord Bia. I had a hankering to use that too for St Patrick's Day, to go with potatoes and pigeon and lots of green salad - just seemed right. I made a simple walnut vinaigrette to toss the leaves then made a spectacularly wonderful dressing with the honey and coriander - seeds and root - and a touch of shallot to tease out the sweet earthiness of the beetroot and the pigeon.

Seriously good.

Warm Pigeon and Beetroot Salad

Serves 2

Don't be put off by the long list of ingredients - it really is very quick to make and assemble and you can do pretty much all of it in advance except cook the pigeon

1 or 2 small beetroots
sprig of thyme
1 tbspn cider vinegar
1 tablespoon butter

8-10 new potatoes

50g hazelnuts, lightly toasted and roughly crushed

Small head of oakleaf lettuce
Generous handful of rocket
2 tablespoons fresh coriander leaves, washed and left whole
2 tablespoons walnut oil
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon lemon juice

2 rashers smoked bacon, cut into 2cm pieces
4 pigeon breasts
2 sprigs thyme
1 tablespoon olive oil

1/4 shallot, finely chopped
2cm piece of fresh coriander root, washed
1/2 teaspoon coriander seeds
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon blueberry honey
1 tablespoon olive oil

50g hazelnuts

2 tablespoons fresh breadcrumbs,
1 clove of crushed garlic
1 tablespoon olive oil
A grind of black pepper

Put the beetroot into a large square of foil along with a sprig of thyme, the vinegar and butter and season generously before sealing up the foil. Steam or roast for about 90 minutes until the beetroot is tender. Allow to cool a little then slip the skins off and cut into large dice and put the still warm pieces into a bowl and seal with clingfilm to keep them moist.

Wash and halve the potatoes then bring to the boil in a pan of salted water and cook till tender, 10-15 minutes. Drain and set aside to cool.

Put the pigeon in a shallow dish with the thyme sprigs and the oil and allow to sit for a few minutes while you make the salad dressings.

For the green leaves, mix the walnut and olive oils with the lemon juice and season.

For the main dressing, crush the shallot, coriander seeds and root and salt with a pestle and mortar till a smooth aromatic paste is formed. Add the honey and mix well then add enough olive oil to give a slightly runny consistency. Season.


Peel and crush the clove of garlic then fry it in a small pan in the olive oil for a minute. Add the breadcrumbs and continue to fry till they are golden and fragrant, then season with pepper and remove from the heat. Drain on kitchen towel.

Gently toast the hazelnuts until they turn golden, remove from the pan and crush them slightly.

In a small pan fry the bacon on a low heat till the fat starts to rend and goes crisp. Remove from the pan and drain on kitchen paper. Turn the heat up under the same pan add the thyme sprigs for a moment then add the pigeon breasts. Cook for about 2 minutes till well seared on one side then turn them over and cook for another 2 minutes. Turn off the heat but leave the meat in the pan to rest while you assemble the salad.

Toss the leaves with the walnut vinaigrette and strew artfully across a couple of plates. Add the potatoes and drizzle with the remains of the vinaigrette. Add half the blueberry honey dressing to the beetroot, mix well and then add them to the salad. Slice the pigeon into bite size pieces. Scatter the bacon and pigeon across the bed of leaves and drizzle the rest of the honey dressing over the top.

Add the nuts and garlic crumbs and dinner is served!


Thoroughly wonderful meal for us, and I hope you all had a brilliantly enjoyable St Patrick's Day too!

Pumpkin Soup

According to the BBC's Wheel of Hunger Pumpkin Soup is the most searched for recipe this week. Look no further, this is a sublime soup and ethereally beautiful to boot. I heard Heston Blumenthal on Women's Hour last week - yes I'm obsessed but it was actually by chance. He was talking about the delights of this soup and its relative simplicity to make and its resulting complexity when you taste it. With the recipe posted on the BBC site (I seem to be getting my licence fee's worth this week) I couldn't resist.

I love pumpkin, always have. It's a wonderful veg to roast or mash with cream, its vibrant colour brings joy to curries and soups, particularly this time of year as the days get shorter and colder and wetter. We ate it a lot when I was a kid, my mother was a huge fan, with a particular fondness for a type called Queensland Blue. It's a huge beast with steel blue skin and riotously orange flesh, with a good texture and not too sweet. It's only negative is the skin is spectacularly difficult to cut through - I was endlessly trapping a big knife halfway through cutting unable to take it further or get it out again.

Friday I set out to hunt me a piece of pumpkin, a proper tasty thing like we used to eat. I knew Brixton Market would have a good selection and would cut me a hunk to match my specifications. Though there was no chance of the Aussie favourite I was looking for similar - and found a lovely steel blue specimen that turns out is called Crown Prince. Smaller and neater it still has a wonderfully ridged exterior and a smooth orange interior. Perfect. For some reason I assumed it would be easier to peel than the ones of my youth but no, just as infuriatingly difficult as I remember. But worth it.

I was faithful to the Heston version Friday night, coating the inside of the bowls with a nubbly aromatic mix of rosemary, breadcrumbs and hazelnuts but for lunch next day I simply toasted some nuts and crushed them before scattering them over the soup with dots of pepper oil and a light sprinkle of salt chrystals.

This is a wonderfully complex soup with incredible depth of flavour. I must warn you to start early - it takes a while to put it all together but you will be richly rewarded. I can imagine it served in tiny bowls at the start of a long meal, perfect for Christmas Day perhaps at the end of a long bracing walk.

Pumpkin Soup by Heston

It seems odd to weigh liquids but it's actually quick and easy

850g Pumpkin flesh

Olive oil

250g Unsalted butter

3 Onions, peeled and finely sliced

400g Whole milk

4 sprigs of rosemary

Pinch of cayenne pepper

40g Sesame oil (or to taste)

40g Balsamic vinegar (or to taste)

Salt

20g Hazelnuts, toasted until golden brown

½ sprig of rosemary

20g coarse dry breadcrumbs

1 tbsp melted brown butter (see tip below)

1 Red pepper, de-seeded, roasted and peeled, then cut into diamonds

Pumpkin seeds

Red pepper oil (see tip below)

Thinly slice half of the pumpkin on a mandolin and cut the other half into large cubes. Roast the large cubes of pumpkin drizzled with a little olive oil at 180 for 40 minutes.

Melt 200g of the butter in the saucepan and sweat the onions and pumpkin slices for approximately 10 minutes.

In the meantime, in a second pan, heat the milk until almost simmering. Turn off the heat, add the rosemary, allow to infuse for 20 minutes. Strain the liquid and discard the rosemary.

When the onions are translucent, add the rosemary milk, 600g cold tap water and the roasted pumpkin, bring to the boil and reduce to a simmer for 10 minutes until the sliced pumpkin is soft. Remove from the heat, liquidize and pass through a fine sieve. Season with cayenne, sesame oil, balsamic vinegar and salt.

When ready to serve, combine the toasted hazelnuts with the rosemary and blitz to a coarse powder. Combine with the breadcrumbs. Brush the inside rim of the soup bowls with the brown butter and coat with the hazelnut and rosemary mixture.

Place some red pepper diamonds and pumpkin seeds in the bottom of each bowl.

Warm the soup, add the remaining 50g of butter and aerate with a hand blender. Ladle into the nut-encrusted bowls and garnish with drops of red pepper oil.

Brown Butter

Melt unsalted butter in a medium pan over a gentle heat, whisking continuously, until the solids turn golden brown and give off a nutty aroma. Take the pan off the heat immediately, strain the butter through a coffee filter and store in the fridge.

Red pepper oil

1 Red pepper, de-seeded, roasted and peeled

100g Groundnut or grapeseed oil

Put the pepper and oil in a liquidizer and blitz until fine.

Strain through a fine sieve and pour into a bottle. Keep in the fridge for 4-5 days only.

Ostrich Dinner

Is size important?



See that ostrich egg? It was my prize in a great thing to do with eggs competition. I am a huge fan of all eggs but I've never tried one of these enormous beauties. Though they often catch my eye at Borough on the Gamston Wood stall and I start to wonder... Was more thrilled than perhaps I should have been when my name came up. Unbelievable when it finally arrived, up close it's not just huge but HEAVY. We're talking an egg you weigh by the kilo.


At which point I suddenly realised I had no idea at all what to do with this exotic monster. It is a rare instance when google offers little by way of practical instruction - I was a touch flummoxed. The Clarence Court box it came in cheerfully informed me it contained the equivalent of 24 hen's eggs and suggested boiling 50 minutes for soft - 90 for hard - or scramble for a family size omelette. Hmmmm. We are but two.

I put it aside for a few days, thought about it, looked at recipes for eggs. It had to be special - slowly but surely the challenge was beginning to delight me. I found a recipe in Christine Manfield's Spice for kangaroo fillet atop a nori omelette and decided to adapt it. Out went kangaroo and hen's eggs, in came ostrich egg and ostrich steak to make a sort of mother and son ostrich delight.

But I am getting ahead of myself. The ostrich egg is a thing of simple beauty and I wanted, if possible, to keep the shell when the rest was but memory.

First? Drain your egg. Definitely needed the man's help. The shell is thick and strong so we used a metal skewer and a hammer to make a hole in one end and repeated the same thing at the other. Takes no time at all to realise these dinky holes will never let the yolk out whole so back to the skewer. Insert it far as you can into one hole and swizzle it round to break up the yolk - you will encounter some resistance to start. This is a bit icky but it gets no worse. Take the skewer out and reinsert it in the other end and repeat.

Place the egg on top of a large jug - I ended up with just over a litre of liquid - and let it drain. Patience is required - it takes about 45 minutes to empty out.

The man - though usually more patient than me - tried to help it along by blowing. Mostly it just made him go red...

While he helped in his own special way, I set about making the nori omelette - chosen in part because it uses 10 eggs. Ten! I loved the idea of this omelette - you make lots of little thin ones then roll them into a big fat one for an egg lovers treat.



Sesame Ostrich Fillet with nori omelette, ginger pikelet and chive cream

Serves 4

Though there are lots of elements, this is really very simple to make and very elegant to serve

1/2 tspn white sesame seeds
1 nori seaweed sheet
100ml olive oil
1 tspn mirin
1/4 tspn fresh ground white pepper
1/2 tspn dried bonito flakes
250g ostrich steak
4 tspns of sour cream mixed with 2 tspns chopped chives

Pikelet mixture
350g maris piper potatoes, peeled
1 large egg (or 50g ostrich egg)
1 tbspn plain flour
2 tspns chopped chives
1 tspn finely grated ginger
1 tspn salt
1/2 tspn fresh ground black pepper
50ml double cream

Nori omelettes
2 nori seaweed sheets
10 large eggs - or 500g ostrich egg
pinch of salt
1/2 tspn fresh ground black pepper
1 tspn sesame oil
1 tspn fish sauce vegetable oil

Dry roast sesame seeds over gentle heat until just coloured. Toast nori sheet by running it over a direct flame for a few seconds, then chop it finely. Combine sesame seeds, toasted nori, oils, mirin, pepper and bonito, then add meat and refrigerate for at least 5 hours.

To make the pikelet mixture, cut the potatoes into 2 cm dice. Put them into the blender with the rest of the ingredients except the cream and blend briefly. Add the cream and pulse until just incorporated. Pour mixture into a plastic jug, cover and refrigerate until ready to use.

To make the nori omelettes, toast the nori sheets over a direct flame - use a match or candle if you don't have gas hob - then cut into strips. Lightly whisk eggs (don't aerate them) then season with salt, pepper, sesame oil and fish sauce and stir in nori strips.

Heat a small 20cm non stick pan and brush it lightly with oil. Ladle in just enough egg mixture to cover the base of the pan, spreading it very thinly. Cook until just set over moderate heat, then turn out onto a clean tea towel. Continue process with remaining mixture, stacking omelettes on top of each other as you go.

Roll omelette stack into a roulade, then wrap firmly in plastic film and secure ends. Allow to cool for 30 minutes.

To cook the ostrich steak, heat a heavy based chargrill pan until extremely hot, then remove the steak from the marinade and sear quickly on all sides to just seal - this should take 2 minutes all up. Transfer meat to a plate to rest for a few minutes before slicing.

To cook the pikelets, heat a large non stick skillet and oil lightly, then pour pikelet mixture into 4 oiled egg rings. Cook over moderate heat until bubbles start to appear in batter, then flip them over and cook the other side, removing the egg rings as you do so.

To assemble this amazing dish, cut the omelette roll into 2cm thick slices. Place a hot pikelet in the middle of each plate and top with an omelette round. Finely slice the ostrich steak and carefully arrange 4 or 5 slices on top of the omelette, then season with a little black pepper, add a dollop of chive cream and scatter the rest of the chives.

Serve immediately.

This was as fabulous to eat as the egg that inspired it!




Obviously I still had a vast amount of egg to use - next day I made a decadently rich quiche and an even more decadent baked chocolate mud cake that kept us in treats for days.

Big thanks to James Ramsden for running that competition!