DAVE STANFORD rustles up a tasty flan with minimum fuss.

IT’S WINTER and most people yearn for warming stews and piping hot soups to fight off the bitter cold.

I, on the other hand, have developed a bizarre penchant for salad – and I’m not even on a diet.

A crisp green salad coupled with a baked potato bathing in melted butter – I just can’t eat enough of the stuff at the moment. Maybe it’s a hangover from all the Christmas stodge, but more likely I’m trying to shake off the winter blues with a taste of summer.

A salad and baked potato – providing its skins have been rubbed with olive oil and salt first before throwing in the oven – can also provide the useful backbone for an easy-to-prepare lunch when you have visitors.

Today, Stanford Mansions are being invaded for a birthday celebration. Mountains of salad and plenty of baked potatoes have been prepared, but wanting to look like I’ve made a bit more of an effort, I dusted off a long forgotten recipe for a tasty flan.

With flans, it’s the pastry that takes time to get right, but I take the ultimate shortcut in buying the prepared stuff from my local supermarket.

It tastes as good as anything I could attempt with none of the mess or fuss, and I don’t even have to roll it out to make it fit my flan dish.

I use bacon and onion in my egg mix, but you could use leeks, peppers, mushrooms – in fact, pretty much anything that grabs your fancy.

This really is so easy to prepare but looks impressive and tastes great, so good in fact that I’ve had to make another one after my kids wolfed down my first attempt in record time.

Bacon and onion flan

Serves 6-8

Ingredients

One sheet of prepared shortcrust pastry or, if you are making your own, about 250g
50g butter
Four rashers of lean bacon, chopped into small pieces
One onion finely chopped
Three eggs
150ml milk, preferably full-fat
1 tsp Dijon mustard
115g gruyere cheese grated
Salt and freshly ground pepper.

Method

Preheat oven to 190C, gas mark 5.

Use the pastry to line a 22cm flan tin or dish. Line the pastry with greaseproof paper and fill with baking beans or rice and bake for eight to ten minutes until pale golden.

Melt the butter in a pan and fry the bacon until golden, then add the onions until soft. Spread over the bottom of the flan case.

Beat the eggs then stir in the milk, mustard, cheese and seasoning. Pour the egg mixture into the flan case and back until the top is golden – about 30 minutes.

Leave to cool before slicing.