New potato salad with soft-boiled eggs

September 17, 2023 

   

Due to the limited options near my workplace, I am rather fastidious about having food ready at home to pack for lunch. It was my motivation for shopping and preparing this salad on a Sunday morning, even though we had a big afternoon and dinner out planned.

It's a recipe from Six Seasons, a book that I'm strategically working through as the seasons permit. The new potatoes and sugar snap peas seemed right for spring, and the soft-boiled eggs promised the protein I'd need to call this a full meal. Otherwise I was pretty loose with the recipe and I suspect the lead author Josh McFadden was, too: his photograph showed cute little radish rounds that I couldn't see anywhere in the ingredients list. I liked the idea, though, and worked some sesame-soy pickled radishes into my version.

I took a lot of license with the other ingredients and proportions too: more potatoes, less lemon, no scallions, sardines, chilli flakes or mint (but a bit of leftover parsley). Perhaps it's barely the same recipe at all! At the very least, it preserves the trinity of potatoes, peas and eggs that I was originally attracted to.

McFadden recommends that soft-boiled eggs be eaten within 24 hours, so this four-serving size was just right for getting us through two meals before I moved onto other packed lunch plans.

New potato salad with soft-boiled eggs

(heavily adapted from a recipe in Six Seasons by Joshua McFadden and Martha Holmberg)

1/2 - 1 batch sesame-soy pickled radishes

~500g small new potatoes, scrubbed but not peeled

2-3 handfuls sugar snap peas, strings pulled off

zest and juice of 1 lemon

3 tablespoons parsley, roughly chopped

4 eggs, at room temperature

salt and pepper

Start with the radishes, slicing them up and getting them into their sugar-salt pickle mix.

Next, go for the potatoes. The aim is for large bite-sized chunks, so halve or third any potatoes that need it. Fill a large saucepan with water, add a generous dose of salt and the potatoes, and bring it all to the boil. Reduce the heat to a simmer and cook until the potatoes are tender but not falling apart, about 15 minutes.

While the potatoes are cooking, prepare the sugar snap peas, chopping any extra-large ones so that they're all on the generous end of bite-sized. Place them in a large bowl. Add the lemon juice and zest, parsley, and the potatoes when they're ready, stirring everything together. Add salt and pepper, to taste.

Time to soft-boil some eggs! Refill the saucepan with water and bring it to the boil. Gently lower in the eggs with a spoon, and boil them for 8 minutes. Get a bowl of ice water ready, and transfer the eggs into it when their time is up.

Finish off the radishes by squeezing off their pickling liquid and getting them dressed.

When the eggs are cool enough to handle, peel one for each person that's eating on the spot (I saved two eggs in their shells for our lunch the next day).

Scoop the potato-pea mixture into shallow bowls, add radish pickles and scrunched-up egg, and season with more salt and pepper to taste.