Baking with a Tan

I have been on a holiday. Probably the laziest holiday I have taken in my entire life. One involving RyanAir from Stansted in the company of scores and scores of Essex boys and girls, the boys wearing Calvin Klein boxers protruding well above their neon sweatpants, the girls clutching Michael Kors bags over one arm and self tanner in the other hand. Car hire at Malaga, a brief scrum to get out of the airport away from everyone patiently awaiting their package tour buses, and into the hills, to a villa with beautiful fragrant flowers bursting from every crack in the wall and paving, two lemon trees, dusty window sills, and a pool to lie beside. Which I do. Practically every day. Aside fro brief forays to Granada, La Torcal, Nerja, and an ill advised afternoon attempting Malaga's market, I stay by the pool in a permanent doze. It is wonderful - the sun shines and I come back from Spain with a pool tan. Which, seconds after touching down in the grey dawn at Stansted a week after leaving it, I realise looked fabulous in the Andalucian hills, but positively tawdry on the commute to work. In fact the tan looks out of place even when I am up to my elbows in icing sugar. I decide the only answer to the tanned-arms-baking conundrum, is to bake tan-appropriate food. In the villa in which we stayed the owner had thoughtfully placed random Spain-related books - coffee table books with beautiful photographs, maps, tour books, and, yay, cookery and foodie books. One is Claudia Roden's Spain, and in between poolside snoozes, I leaf through it with increasing excitement. During that week I make her rustic egg, potato and onion frittata like meals over and over. I covet an opportunity to make the tuna pie but even I know pies are not things you make when on holiday, even a self catering holiday. Self catering holidays are about bakery bought bed, olives and a great bottle of wine. maybe frozen fishfingers for the kids.  Now I am home contemplating my bronzed arms, Claudia's Spanish tuna pie seems exactly right as a postscript to a fabulous week. I make the pastry (while watching The Great British Bake Off on I Player, which, uncannily, features a pastry episode), and an hour or so later I lift my beautiful, tomato-redolent, oozing creation from the oven. Yup, this is what someone with an Andalucian tan puts on the table for dinner.