By Paolo Arrigo

Spinach For me, spinach is one of the nicest of all vegetables, and a very versatile one too. You can eat it raw (washed carefully) as young leaves in salad, you can boil it and make creamed spinach, you can use it in a wide variety of dishes from filled pasta with ricotta to quiches and tarts, and it’s full of iron. It even had a cartoon based upon it. In Italian, Popeye is called Braccio di Ferro, or Iron Arms, because when he ate the spinach, his arms would explode with rippling muscles. What always amazes me is how much water there is in spinach. If you are serving it boiled, you really have to squeeze the leaves out first, otherwise you will get a puddle of water on your plate.

4 handfuls of fresh spinach - 60 ml olive oil - 3 cloves of garlic chopped - 1 large onion, chopped - 6 fresh basil leaves, torn - a handful of pine nuts (optional) - grated Parmesan cheese - 500g puff pastry - 3 eggs, beaten - salt and freshly ground black pepper

Wash the spinach and blanch in salted water for 2 minutes. Remove, drain and squeeze out as much water as you can. Pour the olive oil into a pan and gently fry the garlic, onion, fresh basil and pine nuts, if using, mixing in the spinach after a few minutes and adding a generous amount of Parmesan, salt and pepper. Fry for just a few minutes over a medium heat and then switch off the heat, leaving the ingredients in the pan to warm through. Roll out the pastry to about 3 mm in thickness and use it to line a greased shallow ovenproof dish, allowing an overlap of 2 cm round the edges. Spread the spinach filling out inside to about 1 cm in thickness, then pour the beaten eggs in on top and fold the pastry overlap over the edges of the spinach to seal it. Bake in the oven at Gas Mark 4/180°C for 40 minutes and serve hot or cold.