Colcannon

I finally made Colcannon. Oh, yowza!This is the version with kale instead of cabbage, plus leeks and ham and a little carrot. Hot and filling; I ate an entire bowl full!

It really ought to have pepper and a pinch of mace but I subbed a bit more nutmeg for the mace. Plus plenty of good Irish butter.

Even the cats wanted a taste. Rannie took a direct approach:Huck tried to convince me to let him sit in my lap, from where he could stage an assault on the soup plate of tasty goodness.Sorry, kids. Kibble and catnip instead?

I highly recommend colcannon. It's easy to make, though a bit pan-intensive. I fried a couple strips of bacon and used the aft and a little high-temp oil to saute the kale (and leeks and carrots) and used pre-cooked ham chunks, simmered in water; when the potatoes were done, I poured the water off the ham and replaced it with the potato water. So there's two saucepans and the wok. I microwaved the milk to heat it up -- the trick is to do it in short jolts so you don't boil it.

Add butter, stir them up with a knife and mash the potatoes in the pan they were cooked in, adding hot milk a little at a time (I leave the skin on, which calls for a good sharp knife; vary to suit yourself. A big dinner fork is ideal for the actual mashing), use a flexible spatula to scrape mashed taters into the wok atop the veggies. Mix and add the ham and the bacon (if you didn't eat it already), stir some more and serve out into bowls with a pat of butter and some parsley. Enjoy!

Colcannon: It's What's For Dinner

     Tonight, I made the real deal, the pure quill: Colcannon, genuine mashed potatoes with a good ham steak and rich, dark kale garnished with spring onions, scallions and just a hint of cherry pepper -- all mixed together!

     It's an Irish dish, hot and filling and while it might sound a bit odd, it tastes great.  I've made it before but somehow didn't through the just-over long, dark depressing Winter.

     This time I went almost traditional -- chopped up the ham steak and heated it while the tatties were boiling, scissored kale into little bits and sauteed briefly with diced onions and cherry pepper (pickled!) once the potatoes were cooked and while they were drying.  From there on, it's simple -- leave the kale be and mash the potatoes, gradually adding milk and a little butter (etc.)  'til they feel right (I do skin-on, which means the initial stirring gets done with a scissors or a sharp knife). Then mix in the ham and kale, strir it up good and serve steaming hot, sprinkled with parsley and a pat of butter melting in a little divot on top.  I like it with rather a lot of ham and kale in the potatoes.

     Tam went back for seconds; I had a bit more, too.

     ...And we watched this week's Archer which, after a worrisome start, is back to being the best show on television.

Dinner Leads To Dishwashing

     Let's start with the dinner.  Yesterday evening, the weather turned a little nasty.  About five p.m., heavy  rain and light thunderstorm cried and grumbled their way through town.  I decided colcannon would be good for supper* on a day like that.

     Colcannon's an Irish treat and not too difficult to make -- good mashed potatoes mixed with cooked greens, typically cabbage or kale, and a little bacon or ham, served with melted butter and parsley.  I found a recipe that looked interesting, with the butter just browned and scallions (I used most of a large white onion left over from grilled hamburgers on Saturday) cooked with the cabbage, and made a nice big pot of the stuff.  You fry the cabbage and onion separately (in the same pan used to brown the butter) and deglaze with a little chicken broth, adding it to the mashed potatoes before serving. I put most of a couple of diced slices of "country ham" in with the potatoes and a little with the cabbage, and skipped adding salt since the ham's got plenty.  A bit of fresh-ground black pepper was all the seasoning it needed.

     It turned out nicely.  Tam had two bowls!  And then I was left with a big pot holding a small amount of a mashed potatoes and greens mix that can turn to concrete if left for later, so I turned to loading the dishwasher after my TV show.†  It's easy enough to clean up before it sets and I soon had the machine hissing and chuckling away under the counter.

     We use a dry-erase board to keep track of dishwasher status.  With two people in the house and loading and unloading being catch-as-can, you have to do something.  But "dirty," "clean" and "empty" get boring.

     So I came up with another way to say it.
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* I habitually call the evening meal "dinner," which may be a Hoosierism or Midwesternism.  That was the term used when and where I grew up.  The odd thing is, the big mid-day meal eaten after church on Sunday was referred to as "Sunday dinner," too.  Breakfasts and regular lunches tended to be small and simple, so perhaps in my dialect, "dinner" means a large sit-down meal.

† Ascension, which is kind of interesting, though full of anachronisms.  Perhaps they will be explained; at present, I am wondering if the writers just don't remember what the world was like before handheld devices. 

Colcannon For Dinner

     This was our treat yesterday:

TAMARA KEEL PHOTO

     Colcannon, mashed potatoes with greens and some kind of smoked pork, seasoned with onion and parsley.

     This version was made with ham and nice curly kale, lightly cooked before adding to the potatoes.  The milk was heated with chopped green onions, salt and pepper, and it's as good -- and as filling -- a meal as you might expect.  To serve, you make a little "well" in it and fill with butter and parsley flakes.

     There were leftovers.  This morning, I added a little more milk, an egg and a small amount of flour, and fried up potato pancakes.  They were delicious!

     If you have been looking at kale with suspicion, you should try it in this.  It's wonderful.

Ahhh, Food!

As I write, I'm digging into a bowl of colcannon. This is the kale/ham/mashed taters version, with some leeks and chives for zing, a nice hot, filling dish for a cold evening. (Here's an Official Recipe and I'll even give you hint: that's about 2 pounds of potatoes.)

It's a bit more heart-healthy than the usual sort, as the market had feck-all for cream; but 1% milk and plenty of Irish butter does well enough. I steamed the kale and leeks, then steamed the cold diced ham, too, yesterday's honeybaked spiral-cut ham sold at a discount. Mash the tatties and stir it all together, serve with a dollop of butter and the chives on top.

Washing it down with blackberry soda, a lower-sugar version with plenty of flavor. Ahh!

(H'mm, finish off the colcannon tonight or save it to take in to work for lunch tomorrow? Decisions!)

Christmas Brunch

Some people have turkey (again) or goose; some have a fine ham.At Roseholme Cottage, we had bangers & mash with scratch-made onion gravy and fried cabbage. Looking at the larder, I was tempted to mix things up a bit by making colcannon, but decided cabbage on the side would work better.

Simple, hearty, warm fare for a cold and snowy day.

Update: I had a question about the cabbage. There's nothing to it; cut into narrow wedges, slosh a little bit of red wine vinegar or cider vinegar on them, sprinkle a couple of pinches of sugar on each side and fry, briefly, next to the sausage. I cheated on the bangers a bit, too -- they were such fine, fat examples that I set a pan lid over them for part of their cooking time to ensure they'd cook all the way through.

Another Week

     And plenty of rain.  We've been fortunate this winter; had it been cold enough for our spells of rain to have been snow instead, it would have been pretty deep by now.  There have been a few bad winters in my life, and I'm not a fan.

*  *  *

     I wasn't a fan of the can of blackeyed peas I opened up last night, either.  They were....dry.  Something had gone wrong.  When I discovered this, I was a half-dozen green onions, half a bell pepper, half of a leftover cooked pork roast and a can of diced tomatoes into cooking a dish of Hoppin' John.  This made it a little vexing, and I may have uttered a few words one really should not say.

     At Roseholme Cottage, we keep canned beans on the shelf as part of the rotating stock of staples and while I would have preferred blackeyed peas (possibly my favorite bean), black beans made a fine dish, served over rice with some hot sauce, just thing for a rainy, chilly evening.  The dish is flexible, though Wikipedia tells me that using black beans makes it "Hoppin Juan!"  Good by whatever name; like oxtail stew or colcannon, this is another of those combinations that shows up all over, under different names, and everyone claims it for their own.  They're all probably right.

Dinner Tonight

     Skin-on mashed potatoes with a touch of garlic and two strips of bacon crumbled in; cabbage wedges treated with wine vinegar, fresh-ground mixed pepper and sugar, then fried up in the bacon fat; alongside, the last of the corned beef brisket, sliced and heated up.

     It was darned good.  I wanted something warming, something colcannon-ish, and this filled the bill.  (Tam qualified for the Clean Plate Club, in fact)

     Still on my list to try, the interesting Spanish take on mashed potatoes-and-greens-and-smoked-pork, called trinxat.  Olive oil instead of butter?  Sounds delish!

Dinner Tonight

     I had a little warmed-up colcannon for lunch.  I've been good all week.

     So tonight's dinner is a small bowl of vanilla ice cream -- okay, Tahitian Vanilla Bean Gelato -- exactly one serving per the label, sprinkled generously with good cinnamon and some crushed walnuts.

     It might not be to everyone's taste but it suits mine to a T.  The cinnamon-on-vanilla thing especially; if you haven't tried it, you've been missing out on one of Nature's little delights.  oooooh, yeah.

     (Also: I use one of those soda-fountain-type ice cream scoops that empty themselves when you push a lever, and I am pleased if not proud that I can still lick the left-over ice cream outta that gadget.  One scoop is one serving, and by golly I am not rinsing any good vanilla gelato down the drain that I can eat instead.)

"Run In Circles, Scream And Shout?"

      Or, better yet, don't.  Even though the pundits believe we're sliding into a butter shortage.  I noticed the other day that our grocer was out of the fancy imported stuff I prefer.  It was no big deal; butter keeps and at any given time, I have two or three tubs stacked at the back of the fridge.*  I have done so ever since there was bobble in supply during the pre-vaccine pandemic.

      I didn't realize there was more to the story, but it turns out butter prices have been creeping up a little more quickly than the general increasing cost of everything: the entire Northern Hemisphere had a hot summer, which affects milk production, and the return of normal life means more butter-using activities -- baking and cooking in general, mostly (I hope).  Supply is down and demand is up.

      So, panic?  Nope.  It's not nefarious, milk cows aren't extinct, and "What, no butter?" has been a solved problem for somewhere between 153 years and forever, depending on who you're asking and what you want to use the tasty fats for.  Oleomargarine is the most direct substitute and these days it really is (as the old ads imply) credibly close to the real thing.  Margarine is churned out (ahem) via industrial processes and the supply scales up pretty readily.  The observed price increase of butter means some people will already be switching to margarine -- there's "Econ 101" again -- prompting an increase in margarine supply. How well will it track demand?  I can't predict that but chances are it won't be too far off, and to make up the shortfall--

      Humans crave fats.  At one point, we never got quite enough.  That was back when our tools were made of wood, bone and stone and we dressed in leather, fur and leaves -- or nothing.  We never stopped looking for more edible grease and we've picked up a few tricks since then.  Depending on where you grew up and who your grandparents were, you're already familiar with lard, beef or mutton tallow, schmaltz, duck fat, olive oil and vegetable oils generally.  They've all been in the larder for at least thousands and possibly tens of thousands of years.  They all work well for baking and many are excellent on bread or other baked goods.  (Bread dipped in good olive oil, with or without flavorings, is a real treat.  Then there's the Spanish analog to colcannon, mashed potatoes and greens with a bit of smoked meat diced in: the Irish give it a little puddle of melted butter, but the Spaniards serve theirs with olive oil!)  None of  the replacements are butter, true enough, but even seal oil has its fans: humans crave fats.  It's built right into us and we have a plenitude of sources for them.  (I left out Crisco, which is essentially lard for vegans.)

      We may run low on butter this holiday season.  But don't be stampeded; we're not about to run out of the delicious fats we crave or the even more delicious baked treats we make with butter and a long list of useful substitutes.  If some eeeeevil "them" are after our food supply through the butter supply, "they" must have failed Home Ec -- more likely, the fear-mongering talking heads are certain you did.
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* Alternating, these days, between the regular version of Irish butter and the softer cut-with-olive-oil kind, nearly a dollar per tub cheaper and tasting the same as nearly as I can tell.  And there's Consumer Econ 101 in a nutshell.  It'll crop up again.