This is a great recipe for a frittata¹ which sees the hard-working onion move away from its more accustomed supporting role and take centre stage, where it plays a sublime lead part alongside French starlet, Chèvre Blanc². The following recipe serves between four and six.

Ingredients

• 4 or 5 medium-to-large Spanish onions (the big ones)
• 8 eggs
• Approximately 200g of goats' cheese³
• Between 5 - 10 cloves of garlic (more if you think you're hard enough)
• A handful of fresh sage
• Olive oil
• Salt and pepper

Method

1. Chop the onions roughly into biggish pieces - no fancy slicing and dicing needed here. Chop the garlic roughly too.

2. Into a big old sturdy frying pan glug a handsome dollop of olive oil and heat up over a highish flame. Then add the roughly chopped onions and garlic. On top of this eye-stinging white mountain, shred with your hands the fresh sage, flowers, sticks and all. One thing to note: do not add salt and pepper at this stage. We want the onions to caramelise and go all brown and sweet; we'll add the seasoning to the eggs a bit later on. Toss the whole lot a couple of times with a large spoon or spatula (ideally you should be thinking, 'God, there's loads of onions here') and then turn the heat right down to low and cover the pan with a lid; a dome-shaped wok lid is perfect. Let the onions slowly cook down for about an hour, turning them occasionally, making sure they don't burn or stick to the bottom of the pan. They will eventually reduce down and turn a lovely gooey-sweet brown colour.

3. Beat your 8 eggs into a bowl or large glass, adding generous amounts of fresh black pepper and (if you're really going to town) some mineral-rich flaky sea salt crystals. Normal salt will do.

4. Try and slice horizontally the Chèvre Blanc to create two thin 'discs' or 'rounds'. Goats' cheese is crumbly and a bit sticky, so don't worry too much if you make a bit of a mess; just lay out on a plate the goats' cheese pieces you've managed to slice, ready to put on top of the onion and egg mixture a bit later on.

5. Pour into a clay flan ovenproof dish (or similar) some olive oil, maybe three glugs or so from the bottle. Put the dish with the oil in it into an already pre-heated oven (on high temperature) so that the oil gets quite hot. Try and time this in accordance with the fact that the onions will take about an hour to caramelise.

6. When the onions are done (they should look really sweet and nice now) take out the hot dish from the oven with the (hopefully) hot oil in it and pour in the beaten eggs. The eggs will sear slightly as they make contact with the hot surface of the oil in the dish. Immediately add the caramelised onions, spreading evenly, and on top of this lay out flat your pieces of goats' cheese, covering as much of the surface area as possible. Add a few more twigs of sage on top of the cheese for garnish.

7. Put the dish back in the oven and cook for about 15 minutes on a medium heat. When you remove the dish, the eggs will have risen and the goats' cheese will have half melted, just starting to turn a little brown at the edges.

8. Serve the onion and goats' cheese frittata with a simple bitter salad; watercress, tomato and a few slices of avocado pear with a nice sharp dressing is ideal.