This morning when I woke up I had a plan to make a cake with a union flag topping composed of strawberries, blueberries and white chocolate chips. I even bought a £2 box of organic blueberries from Sainsbury's at lunchtime. However come the evening, the desire to make cake had faded away, it was my turn to cook dinner and I needed to come up with something quick and easy.

Pies, pies, pies. During our stay in Scotland, we visited Mark McGills butchers and ate some of the most delicious pies I have tasted in sometime.

On the long drive back to London, I thought about how I should bake more savoury foods and entertained the thought of making steak and kidney pies, chicken and leek pies. However this evening I decided that I might start with something simple like quiche. It has been sometime since I made quiche and my recent forays with egg have been frittata based. I decided that today I was going to make my own quiche crust. I eventually came across this recipe that appeared to be very simple. As usual I modified it according to the contents of my cupboard but it came out very nice. I might prebake it for 5 minutes next time though. The egg mixtures was sans milk and cheese because I simply did not have any in the fridge. However I did have onions, peppers, mushrooms and ham, that I chopped up and added to my egg mixture. I am wanting to use more spices in my cooking but with tastes and flavours that suit me rather than the 'usual suspects', so I somehow ended up adding some smoked paprika and nutmeg. The whole thing turned out quite nice! I made a salad of tomatoes and carrots which was a great accompaniment.

Ingredients
Quiche crust
1 cup of spelt flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup of olive oil
1/4 cup of ice water

Quiche
4 eggs
2 small onions – chopped
1 red pepper – chopped
4 medium sized mushrooms – chopped
Handful of chopped Wiltshire ham
1/4 tsp smoked paprika
1/4 tsp nutmeg
pinch of salt

Method

Quiche crust
1. Mix flour and salt with fork.
2. Beat oil and water with whisk or fork to thicken.
3. Pour into flour and mix with fork.
4. Press into 9" pie crust.

Quiche mixture
1. Saute the chopped onions in a small amount of olive oil until soft
2. Add the chopped peppers and mushrooms and spices and stir on low heat for 5 – 10 minutes or until soft
3. Add the chopped ham and stir for another few minutes then allow the mixture to cool for 5 – 10 minutes.
4. Whisk the eggs with a pinch of salt and pepper
5. Add the vegetable and ham mixture to the whisked egg
6. Pour the quiche mixture into the pie dish
7. Bake for 30 minutes