A Simple Recipe for Spinach Pie

First place the spinach in a large colander, sprinkle with a little salt, rub into the leaves and leave for 30 minutes to drain the excess liquid.

Big colander is dirty and there's too much spinach to fit in the sieve so skip this step. The spinach probably doesn't need draining anyway.

Then preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Melt the butter or margarine in a large pan and fry the onions until golden.

Damn - haven't got any butter. Nick some of flatmate's instead. Realise after five minutes that the butter isn't melting because oven isn't turned on at the wall. Turn on oven. Chop onions using flatmate's very sharp knife. Rinse sliced open finger under tap and put on plaster. Put slightly bloodied onions in with the butter which should now be a little burned.

Add the garlic, crumbled feta cheese and pine nuts. Remove from the heat and stir in the eggs, spinach, saffron and spices. Mix well.

Try to crumble feta cheese into a bowl but get it all over the floor and worktop as well. Rinse brine out of cut on finger. Haven't got any pine nuts or saffron so have to do without. Root around in flatmate's cupboard for paprika. Find something that may be paprika but not labelled so decide not to risk it (last time you mistook garum masala for tumeric and ended up with some very strange tasting kedgeree). Break eggs into bowl. Pick out the bits of eggshell and beat into a satisfying pulp. Find the biggest bowl in the kitchen and pour everything in. Damn - not big enough. Try to mix with a wooden spoon but fail and have to use hands instead. Wash cheesy, eggy onion mixture off hands.

Grease a large, rectangular baking dish. Take seven of the sheets of filo and brush one side with a little olive oil. Place on the bottom of the dish, overlapping the sides.

Cheat and use ready-made filo pastry. Haven't got olive oil so sunflower will have to do. Lay down the filo sheets and then realise that you forgot to grease the dish. Take the filo sheets back and grease the dish with more purloined butter. Relay the now ripped filo sheets and spray each one with sunflower oil.

Spoon all of the spinach mixture over the pastry and dribble 2tbsp of the remaining olive oil over the top.

When spooning notice that the mixture is not that well mixed so half the spinach pie will be very cheesy while the other half is very oniony. Wipe up the egg that has dribbled all over the worktop.

Fold the overlapping pastry over the filling. Cut the remaining pastry sheets to the dish size and brush each one with more olive oil. Arrange over the top of the filling.

Scissors are dirty so rip the filo sheets instead. By the time it's finished the spinach pie should look like it's survived an intifada.

Brush with water to prevent curling and then bake in the oven for 30 minutes, until the pastry is golden brown.

Clean up the devastation in the kitchen. Pick out the spinach leaves blocking the plug hole and sweep up the feta cheese on the floor. Impatiently check the pie every five minutes. Take it out when it's just on the underdone side and serve it with anything in the fridge. And because it's so big you will be eating slightly undercooked spinach pie until the end of time. Enjoy!

In Case of Zombies, Break Glass

I was at a friend’s birthday party the other night and another friend announced that he and his flatmates had a set of protocols in case the dead arose and started to feast on the living. Unfortunately I became distracted by the lemon squares that had suddenly come on offer and never got the chance to continue the conversation any further but it did remind me of a similar conversation a year or so ago with my flatmate’s boyfriend.

We had a book “The Zombie Survival Guide” that lay in our bathroom for several months and, judging from the well thumbed appearance it quickly developed, was a source of much toilet-based entertainment. It became so popular that I walked into our kitchen one day to find my flatmate and my other flatmate’s boyfriend discussing a survival strategy in case a “Dawn of the Dead” scenario ever arose.

Step One: Block off the staircases. Being on the third floor we could ensure our safety from the zombie hordes below. The book suggested destroying the stairs completely but ours are solid Victorian stone and so this would probably require several days and some sort of wrecking ball, neither of which would be practical so we’d just have to settle for barricading ourselves in with various items of furniture.

Step Two: Once the immediate danger of being eaten by zombies had passed we would have to turn our attention to longer term survival. The book recommends that every household should have a stash of canned foods in case of such an event but, as all I have in my cupboard at the moment is two elderly potatoes and a box of teabags along with tube of garlic paste that I’m certain isn’t mine, this isn’t going to happen and so this would have to be dealt with sooner rather than later. My flatmate suggested that we could grow vegetables in the back garden. I pointed out several problems with this plan. Firstly, and most vitally, I didn’t have any vegetable seeds and I very much doubted if anyone else would have a packet of cabbage seeds kicking around. Secondly I suspect any of us would know how to grow a dandelion let alone enough vegetables to feed five. Thirdly vegetables take weeks to grow and so we would starve anyway before the first potatoes had taken seed.

Step Three: If by an amazing act of divine intervention we actually managed to grow something that was both edible and nourishing we would construct an array of zipwires to get around and link up with similar communities in Marchmont (probably propelled by all the gas produced by a diet of vegetables). Again I saw a problem. None of us were engineers. One of my flatmates only has one tool in her toolkit which is a hammer which gets used from everything from assembling flatpack furniture to changing a light bulb and the bookcase that I bought from Ikea is held together by duct tape and hope.

I was firmly told to stop being pedantic. I was missing the point. The point wasn’t long term survival but rather avoiding being zombie snacks. We’d probably perish of hunger or plummet to our deaths from a poorly constructed zipwire or just kill each other in some sort of cabin fever induced frenzy but hey, at least we wouldn’t be zombie food. And that was the most important thing of all.