Watercress soup with Easter nest

A very busy Easter weekend has come and gone and all my plans of posting more ideas (recipes as well as decoration) have gone out of the window!
It was not for lack of trying, though: I made several attempts at finding alternative ways of dying Easter eggs, given that egg dyes are not available here in the UK. But alas, I didn't have much luck, as you will see below.
Much more successful, even though quite tricky to make, was a nice, seasonal starter I made on Easter Sunday: a thick & tasty soup of watercress and spinach, adorned with a beautiful Easter nest. I got the idea in a newsletter from a spa hotel I used to go to in Austria - the egg nest is tricky to make, but the visual effect is stunning. The base is made by cutting potatoes into very thin stips, curled up in a small sieve and deep-fried enough to hold its shape when removed from its container. If you're anything like me, the baskets will have you swearing to start with, but once you get the hang of it, they're not too difficult. They're certainly nice to look at with their potato straw baskets, salad cress lining and boiled quail's egg sitting in the middle and will earn you enough brownie points for presentation to make you forget all the fiddling beforehand.
But back to my attempts at dying. Following a request from a reader, I tried natural dyes for Easter eggs this year. Despite egg dyes being widely available in Austria, there were some years when my Mum dyed them naturally and I was convinced I could do the same. So off I went to my local Neal's Yard store (no, not the cheese shop, there's also a shop by the same name which specialises in natural remedies) to get some herbs which I wanted to use for tinctures or decoctions in which to dye the eggs. I knew that onion skins would work well, but they give you brown eggs... why would I go to great lengths to secure white eggs (these days, ALL hen's eggs here in the UK are brown) from ducks only to dye them brown? If I wanted brown eggs, I could just hard-boil the chicken eggs widely available in the supermarkets and polish them!
No, the plan was to use goldenrod or marigold (for yellow), hibiscus for red/pink and bilberries for purple eggs. So I washed the duck's eggs with vinegar to get rid of any dirt, boiled afore-mentioned fruits/flowers for 30 minutes, put in the eggs, boiled them for 12 minutes and left them to stand for the colours to really stick to the shell. At this point I wasn't even worried about their yolks turning a funny colour due to overcooking (which they didn't, amazingly), all I wanted was some beautifully coloured eggs.
I also decided to give some of them a pattern using herbs (coriander, dill) wrapped around the eggs and secured by stuffing the eggs in 10-den ankle-high tights... it worked amazingly well.
The hibiscus dyed the eggs beautifully, giving them a deep pink colour, the marigold was very disappointing, leaving the eggs with only the faintest hue of yellow, barely visible, despite being in their "bath" for many hours. I was very pleasantly surprised with the effect of the bilberries. I cooked them for 30 minutes, then puréed them with a hand-held blender, cooked the eggs in the resulting pulp and left them to cool in it as well. The result was a lovely pastelly purple.
So the dying does work in principle - however, as soon as I took the eggs out of their dye, the colour came off in a thick, greasy paste. It was as if the eggs had been treated with something, a protective layer which hadn't come off when I rubbed them with vinegar, but only through cooking them. If duck's eggs are not the answer, what is? I can't get white chicks' eggs (unless I lay them myself ;-)), the brown eggs all have nasty stamps on them, what am I supposed to use? Any suggestions?

Watercress soup with potato, cress & quail's egg nest
(serves 6 - 8)

For the nests:
2 large baking potatoes (about 10 cm long)
6 - 8 quail's eggs
2 punnets salad cress
oil for frying

For the soup:
2 shallots (peeled and roughly chopped)
20 g butter
160 g watercress (washed and tougher stems removed)
250 g young leaf spinach (washed)
100 ml Oloroso sherry
150 g potatoes (peeled and cut into small cubes)
1 l vegetable stock
50 ml single cream
generous dash Worcestershire sauce
salt, pepper
nutmeg

First, prepare the nests.
Heat enough oil in a pot or pan to fry the baskets, about 10 cm deep.
Peel the potatoes. Using a very sharp knife or a julienne slicer, cut them into very thin strips (ca. 2-3mm). Divide into 6 - 8 heaps and proceed to fry in batches. Make sure you cut the potatoes just before frying them, or else they will discolour badly.
Place the potato strips for one basket on a large ladle and hold into the very hot oil, keeping the ladle close enough to the surface for the strips to soften up in the oil, but without "escaping" from your ladle. Fry for about 1 minute, so that the strips become soft and bendable. (If you are using a metal ladle, make sure to wrap the handle in a towel so you don't burn your hands)
Lift ladle with the potato sticks, letting all the oil drip back into the pot, then transfer the potato strips into a heat-resistant (eg metal) sieve of approx. 6-8 cm diameter. Curl the potatoes to form a nest against the mesh of the sieve, leaving a little space in the middle to hold a quail's egg.
Transfer sieve into the hot oil (again, if you have a metal handle, protect yourself against the heat) and fry the nest until the potato strips are coloured a medium brown. (If you undercook them, the potatoes won't crisp.) Lift, let the oil drip down, the use a fork or spoon to carefully lift the nest out of the sieve and onto some paper towel, salt and leave to drain, cool and crisp up.
Cook the quail's eggs in boiling water for 2 minutes, refresh and leave to cool before peeling them very carefully.
For the soup, melt the butter in a pot, fry the shallots until starting to brown. Add the sherry, watercress and spinach (if you have bought it in a bag, you can save space in the pot by microwaving it to package instructions beforehand) and leave to wilt. Placing a lid on top will spead things up a bit. Top with the vegetable stock and diced potatoes and cook until the potatoes are very soft, ca. 10 minutes.
Purée the soup using a hand-held blender, stir in the cream, then season to taste with the salt & pepper, nutmeg and Worcestershire sauce. If the soup is too thin, reduce to desired consistency.
Assemble the nests by lining the potato baskets with salad cress, then placing a quail's egg each in the nests. Spinkle sparingly with pepper.
Serve the nests in shallow bowls, ladling the soup around the nests at the table.

Comments

[Monika Korngut]

I love watercress, and this soup sounds amazing!! :)

I have tried couloring eggs with natural dye and it is a lot of fun. That's odd that you can't get white chicken eggs only brown... hmm. I don't have any suggestions.

[dinazad]

Aw, c'mon, the natural brown of eggs is nothing compared to the wonderfully rich, almost chestnut color you get with onion skins (you need a lot of onion skins - I start collecting around Christmas)! Maté will give you a beautiful pale olive color. You just boil your eggs in a bed of the skins or with the mate utnil they're hard, no need to soak them afterwards... Turmeric and saffron didn't work for me, and the grey-brown you get with coffee-grounds is depressing...
Still, the problem with the treated eggs is daunting - maybe you could just opt for pale brown eggs?

[Pille]

Oh, Johanna, onion skins only give you brown eggs if you leave them loose in the pan. If you wrap them around the eggs, you'll get most beautiful GustavKlimt-esque creations!!! Most pretty! We got grey eggs using hibiscus/karkade (although we expected pink), and used saffron for pretty yellow ones (all proudly presented here: http://nami-nami.blogspot.com/2007/04/easter-egg-art.html
Oh - and the above plating of watercress soup with Easter nest is simply gorgeous!

[Mishmash!]

I liked ur nest idea..very cute..thanks :)

[johanna]

dinazad, i shall try the mate option.. would never have thought of that!
all: it's funny how you get such different results using the same type of herbs... it must be something in the eggs then, or the quality of the herbs - i guess we'll be trying for years!

[Meg]

Johanna, I don't know if it will help in London, but in Paris you can usually find white eggs in the Kosher section of grocery stores. No idea why - I researched the issue and queried Jewish friends and apparently all it needs for an egg to be Kosher is for it to be unfertilised (duh) and have no spot of blood inside the shell. But there you go, the ultimate irony: Kosher Easer eggs!

One other thought: every recipe I've ever seen calls for adding vinegar to the dye (whether commercial or food colouring). So maybe by using the vinegar before the dye you created a barrier that locked the colour out instead of in??

Anyway, better luck next time around!

[Eva]

Sorry to say that but I'm almost consoled not to be the only person unable to dye easter eggs...;-) Last year, I tried it with beetroot - same result as you had. I wasn't sure if I forgot the vinegar in dye but I did definitely use it this year with my turmeric dye. However, the eggs took on just a little bit of colour in rather nasty specks...

But having achieved such a beautiful easter nest soup, you shouldn't worry about those bloody eggs!

[Jeanne]

Oooh, how gorgeous is that! I love the Easter nest idea and watercress soup is one of those greatly underrated dishes. Thanks for sharing!

[Freya]

I love the potato nest, looks so appetising! I would love to have seen the eggs dyed with the herbs wrapped around them too! Great idea!

[Trig]

Hibiscus not only makes a wonderful red-pink dye, it tastes excellent when infused into water, sweetened and chilled. It's one of the staple drinks of Mexico, and definitely worth a try

[Meg]

Oh and by the way - gorgeous photo!

[Meg]

Oh and by the way - gorgeous photo!

[robin]

After reading your post, I attended a luncheon where we were served "stinging nettle soup." It sounded dangerous, and certainly not as appealing as your watercress soup. To my surprise, it was quite delicious! If stinging nettles can be made into a soup, then watercress must be even more extraordinary.

[D.]

Well to dye your eggs red you could try a marinade the chinese use to make red pork. you can get it at an oriental supermarket, trust me it'll get anything red!

And maybe you can try toxin free watercoulours? it's also fun for your kids to be able to paint their own eggs. I'm from holland and I remember they had special egg paint to paint your eggs with, completely kid friendly.

Also, does food colouring not work? Might be an idea, you get all sorts of colours.
maybe you should boil the eggs first to make the shell more porus so the dye can be absorbed better?