Egg and Bacon Potato Salad

[purplecat]

Crossposted to cookbook_challenge

Another recipe from Restore by Gizzi Erskine.


1kg potatoes
2-3 tbsp salt
3 free-range eggs
110g bacon lardons
2 spring onions, thinly sliced
3 tbsp picked jalapeño slices, finely chopped

For the dressing:
150g soured cream
150g mayonaise
2 tbsp lemon juice
good pinch of salt
good grind of black pepper



Cook the potatoes in salty water. Hard boil the eggs. Fry the bacon.

Mix all the dressing ingredients.

Cut (or pull apart) potatoes into bite-sized pieces. Layer the potatoes in a dish. Add the dressing. Sprinkle over half the spring onions. Peel and chop the eggs and layer over that. Add the bacon, then the jalapeños and then the rest of the spring onions.


Mistakes, Changes and Substitutions
The recipe recommends purple potatoes, "a heritage variety from Peru". Seriously, this cookbook is so middle-class it's almost a parody. Anyway, new potatoes from Sainsbury's it was. There was also another household discussion about whether a cookbook whose raison d'être was sustainability should be recommending heritage potatoes from Peru.

I also discovered late in the day that we had no mayonnaise but nevertheless had a mysterious second pot of soured cream. So I used double soured cream and no mayonnaise for the dressing. Seemed to work fine.

Verdict
I would put this in the "fine but wouldn't make again" category were it not that offspring spontaneously asked to try it and announced that it should be added to the list of things she would eat. Don't get me wrong, there is plenty she will eat if needs must, but the list of things she would choose to eat is considerably shorter and I was surprised she was up for this both because of the soured cream and because of the jalapeños (though she does like olives so maybe that shouldn't have surprised me). All that said, she only ate a serving spoonful of it and then went back to pasta and pesto, which I'd also cooked to avoid the guilt of forcing the offspring to eat food she didn't like. Anyway, I might make this again, particularly should the offspring happen to request it.

Comments

[angelofthenorth]

Purple potatoes are lush if you can get hold of them - I've been known to grow them, and they are amazing in this sort of salad

[purplecat]

I was being slightly facetious, we figured you could probably get them at farmers' markets or the like (were there any farmers' markets happening at present), but even so I feel like this cookbook has a lot of speciality ingredients and it feels very much like "sustainability for the chattering middle-classes in households where one person works at most part time". I can't imagine it would, for instance, help a struggling single-parent on minimum wage eat more sustainably - or, at least, not much and if you're not speaking to people who are cash and/or time poor then you're really not going to make a lot of difference.

[a_cubed]

A quick google check shows that the purple potatoes are grown commercially in France, at least, so it's not like they're being shipped from Peru, necessarily.

Ah, hold on, Brexit. Scratch that, if you can get them in the UK now they probably ARE being shipped from Peru.

(Remember, potatoes are all Peruvian originally, anyway, as far as we know.)

[purplecat]

I was being slightly facetious - I figured you could probably get them at Farmers' markets or - with luck - independent green grocers (possibly, even Waitrose). I still get a very strong vibe off this book of "sustainability for Guardian readers" rather than of an attempt to think about sustainable cooking across the spectrum of UK society. Himself has a lot of opinions about it, given he lectures on conservation and the environment, and he doesn't think this kind of "have an allotment and shop at the farmers' market" approach to sustainability really tackles the core problem at all.

[a_cubed]

Indeed. One of my current research projects involves analysing the SDGs and any serious thoughts about them shows that individual actions are never going to be enough to achieve them. Regulations, markets and existing capital are all far greater barriers than individual choices.