Blue Cheese in December

It had been a good weekend; it began on the Friday evening with a first rate curry and then continued on Saturday with a trip to York to catch up with some old uni mates and then a visit to a real ale pub in the evening with some school friends. As a result when Sunday rolled around it was time to take things a little steadier and do some cooking.

As it was the last weekend prior to me finishing work for the Christmas and New Year Period I decided to make something a little festive. For me there are some foods that you automatically associate with Christmas and one of those is blue cheese, which I usually like to consume with a glass of Port at this time of year. For the recipe I prepared this time round I decided to incorporate some Blue Stilton into a quiche.

The soundtrack today was the Stone Roses' eponymous first album, which combines the best elements of sixties pop and makes them over in a late eighties Mancunian style that is memorable and unique.

I first made the pastry by greasing a 25cm wide pastry tin with margarine and sprinkling a spot of plain flour into it to make sure the pastry did not stick and then preparing the pastry from eight ounces of wholemeal flour and four ounces of margarine.

I put the pastry-lined tin to one side and then made the filling by finely chopping a bunch of parsley and a bunch of spring onions and adding them to a mixing bowl. I then took three ounces of Blue Stilton Cheese and crumbled it into the bowl with three ounces of plain cottage cheese and three ounces of quark, which is a pale, flavourless yoghurt originating from Germany readily available from many supermarkets. I stirred the cheeses, quark and vegetables together vigorously until the whiteness of the cottage cheese and quark covered all the other ingredients.

The next job was to lay my hands on three eggs, crack them into a bowl and whisk them extensively for about five minutes until the yolks had merged totally with the whites. I then added them to the bowl with the other ingredients and stirred them carefully together until the eggs had been fully absorbed. For a final touch I added a hint of white pepper.

After the contents of the bowl had been fully mixed together I poured them into the pastry case and used a butter knife to level the mixture off and spread it evenly throughout the case. I placed the meal in an oven that I had preheated to 180 degrees, 190 for those of you who don't have a fan oven, and let it cook for about thirty minutes. I could tell the quiche was ready as the edges were starting to turn a nut-brown colour.

So what can be said about the taste? Well the answer is that the spring onions and parsley give the quiche a sharp, fresh flavour that helped counterbalance the richness of the cottage cheese, quark and Blue Stilton. On this occasion I had the quiche with a salad but if you want to try this dish closer to Christmas then why not have it as a supplement to some crackers and a large cheeseboard and wash it down with a glass of Port?

A little overdone round the edges but this didn't detract from the excellent taste.