Love egg and chips as a quick, cheap and easy supper? Well, this is a variation on a great British staple dish that’s lower in calories and looks good enough to serve in a top notch restaurant.

Dawn: Decorated with a few sprigs of seasonal herbs, this makes a truly lovely and super quick evening meal with the herbs adding a delicious infusion and aroma. Simply delicious a dish to both make and eat. 

Ingredients

Serves 4

4 eggs, 1 per person

150g potatoes per person (peeled or skins left on)

2 tbsp cooking oil

Salt and pepper

Seasonal herbs to garnish

Method

• Peel and leave whole the potatoes.

Dawn: You can leave the skins on and scrub them clean as they provide a lot of nutrients just lying under their skins. The choice is yours. 

• Place a large enough saucepan on a high heat and add water that is already boiling. Ensure the water is still boiling and add a pinch of salt.
• Add the potatoes to the saucepan and cook until partially soft for about 8-10 minutes.

Dawn: To test to find out how soft the potatoes are, simply take a fork and poke it into the potatoes: if the fork is partly going into the potatoes, then they are ready for the next stage in the cooking process.

• Remove the partially cooked potatoes from the saucepan and set aside to slightly cool as you put half of the cooking oil into a frying pan. Heat the cooking oil on a medium heat.
• Heat the oven to gas mark 2, 130 °C electric.
• Now coarsely grate the potatoes and divide the mixture equally into four portions.

Dawn: It’s worth pointing out that a portion size is roughly the palm of your hand in size. 

• Put the four mounds of potatoes into the frying pan and shape them into flattened circles. Fry them slowly for about 5-10 minutes on a medium heat until, by lifting a ‘corner’ of each up with a fish slice, you can see that they are becoming golden brown in colour. Now, turn each over and cook the other side until golden brown, too. This takes another 5-10 minutes to do, too.
• When cooked to a satisfying golden brown colour, put the potato mounds on a baking tray and place in the oven while you cook the eggs.
• Add the remaining cooking oil to the frying pan and heat on a medium heat until the oil begins to bubble and a little haze comes off it. The oil is now ready to add the eggs to.
• Carefully break the eggs into the frying pan and fry for about 2-3 minutes until the whites have become opaque in look and the yolks are still soft.
• Remove the potatoes from the oven, plate up and add an egg to each. Season with salt and pepper, adding your preferred seasonal garnish.

Dawn: I added wild garlic here as it grows freely close by. Washed and decorative, you can eat the flowers, too and it makes for a very attractive finish to the dish. This meal offers a lower fat version of deep frying traditional chips and helps with supplying much needed energy for our bodies in that potatoes supply vitamins C and B6 as well as providing carbohydrates to maintain a healthy diet. And shallow frying is a healthier alternative method of cooking as opposed to deep frying.

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