Roast New Potatoes and Asparagus with Baked Eggs

Sunday is the day for a decent brunch. Spring is the time for asparagus. Therefore on Sunday mornings in May and June we have asparagus. It stands to reason…

OK, so we might not have asparagus every week – if we are having it for Saturday and Sunday dinner as well, we could be accused of an unbalanced diet. But we have a few options to see us through the season. There’s buttered eggs with brown shrimps, dill and asparagus, and asparagus eggs benedict. Both are great, if buttery.

Roast new potatoes and asparagus with baked eggs is from an old Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall column in The Guardian. It’s utterly simple – the most difficult thing is scrubbing the potatoes – and it hits the mark on a spring Sunday. I suppose at a push it would work on a Saturday too, but then when would we buy the ingredients?

The recipe link gives all the details for a four-person serving, but you can easily vary the amounts to numbers and taste – my amounts are a generous serving for two, including two eggs each. Jersey royals and Cornish new potatoes work beautifully: I keep small ones whole and cut any bigger ones into chunks.

Roast a couple of handfuls of new potatoes tossed in 2 tbsp of olive oil for about 30 minutes at 190ºC/170ºC (fan)/gas mark 5, with 3 or 4 unpeeled but bashed garlic cloves. When the potatoes are almost tender, add a bunch of asparagus, each spear cut into two or three, for another 15 minutes.

When both vegetables are tender – another 10-15 minutes – make four little gaps and break in the eggs. The egg white will run beyond the spaces, but that’s fine. The recipe says that it will take four minutes or so for the whites to set while the yolks remain runny but I invariably find with any baked eggs dish that it takes longer for the whites to set, by which time the yolks are hard. This might be because I always forget to take the eggs out of the fridge in time for them fully to reach room temperature. Whatever the reason, it is often useful to cover the roasting dish for this section – the whites set more quickly (quite why, I have no idea when the oven has an even temperature).

And that’s it – other than sprinkling over a tablespoon or so of snipped chives and some seasoning.

This brunch dish puts the spotlight on two of the kings of the spring. Using small new potatoes and cutting any bigger ones into chunks keeps it on the light side, but substantial enough to set you up for the rest of the day.