Day 22 - Colcannon Cake

This would also qualify as part of the Noble Potato series, as it is a very traditional use of potatoes and winter vegetables to produce a nutritious meal from cheap ingredients that is much more delicious than the sum of its parts sounds.

Colcannon, in its simplest form, is potato and chopped cabbage mashed together with butter, salt and pepper. Tonight the plain recipe was complicated a little by the addition of celeriac to the mash, which adds a great flavour and reduces the need for added fat to almost zero.

Cook as many potatoes and celeriac as you need. The dish below took 5 medium potatoes and about the same volume of celeriac. That was about a third of this one I bought at the Farmers' Market last week! If you want to cook both in the same pan cut the celeriac a little thinner and smaller than your potato pieces as it takes a bit longer to cook.

I used a mix of purple sprouting and red curly Kale for the cabbage part of the recipe. Pick it over and remove any tough stalks, then cook with just enough water to stop it burning, say a centimetre or two in the bottom of the pot. Cover with a lid, it shouldn't take more than 5 or 6 minutes. When it's bright and softened as in the picture above, drain it and chop into bite sized pieces.

Mix into your mash and either serve immediately or pack into a well oiled baking tin and bake for 30 minutes in a hot oven to give a browned and crispy outside. Serve with veggie sausages or a nice beany tomatoey sauce or just as we did with mustard, pickles and soy sauce to our taste. It really is a wonderfully tasty way to eat your greens.