Okay, I am a big fan of Douglas Adams, even choosing to live my life according to his example as an arch procrastinator. He would have turned 60 this weekend and so decided to have a bit of a birthday party.
My initial contact with his work was the BBC television adaptation of the Hitch Hikers Guide and it remains one of the funniest things I have ever seen and one of my clearest recollections from my first viewing was Ford eating Hagro Biscuits on the Vogon ship. Apparently the most wonderful frood food in the galaxy, they were awful because the Dentrassi really hate the Vogons. Honestly it didn't look so good either...
Could I make something similar, especially with the colours, but make it taste somewhat nicer and do it without resorting to food colouring and without resorting to simply putting mushy peas on top of the blue biscuit, because I really don't like mushy peas!
The "Biscuit"
Starting with the biscuit I thought I could make this instead a potato pancake or large blini. I already had some
Vitelotte Potatoes which I had bought from Natoora in the fridge and they have a really amazing bright purple colour which is retained once you cook them.
The other really quite odd thing about these potatoes is that when you cook them the cooking water turns an amazingly dark - almost "nightmare" - green. So this gives me something to form the natural colouring for the thing that is to go onto my biscuit.
Biscuit Recipe:
- 400g Vitelotte Potatoes, peeled
- 75ml milk
- 1 egg
- scant 1/4 cup plain flour
- 25g butter
- Salt and pepper to taste
Method: (reminder: you have to save the potato cooking water!!!)
- Cook and mash the potatoes with the milk, butter and salt and pepper. Retain the cooking water.
- Set the potatoes aside and allow them to cool.
- Once cooled mix the egg and flour into the potatoes until it is a smooth and incorporated paste about the same consistency as a thick pancake mix.
You did remember to retain the potato cooking water, right? It should look something like this. The water should be a dark, almost nightmare, green:
The Topping
From the original show I'd imagined that the topping could have also been scrambled eggs and that would go very nicely with the potato "biscuit" but I can't think of a good way of incorporating the green water with the eggs without making the eggs incredibly runny and again I'm trying to avoid food colouring.
So I decided to try poaching a couple of eggs in the green water to see how much of the colour they'd take up and then chop the eggs into small pieces on top of the pancake.
Cooking the Dish
Cook the pancake as you would normally in a nice amount of butter. I was looking for a relatively large pancake that would take 2 eggs on top. I ended up with a really nice pancake that was bright purple in the middle and really nicely light and fluffy.
Poach 2 eggs in the retained potato water until you're happy with their doneness but make sure they're still very runny in the middle if you can. For me they didn't come out bright green but they did take on a little of the green colour from the water and in fact looked ever so slightly creepy! (even though it doesn't come out so well in the picture below).
From there put the eggs on top of the pancake, add salt and pepper and chop the eggs finely making as big a mess as possible.
It turned out to be a delicious, if ever so slightly naughty, delight! I can see this as a really nice breakfast dish. And not a Vogon in sight...
I'm going to have another go at this and I am keen to know if anyone out there has any ideas on how you could make the eggs greener but without resorting to colours.
