colcannon

I first had Colcannon a month ago. I've made it four times since then. That's how much I like it. A lot.

Now that I write this, I'm not sure what I did for those twenty-four years before Adriana's mom brought this dish into my life. You all met Marcia during our Seven Sumptuous, Scrumptious Soups Week. She's the fiery spirit who birthed Adriana, and a barrel of unpredictable fun. It makes me happy that I get to see her every few months, because she lives considerably closer to me than Adriana does right now.

You never know what you'll be having when you go to dinner at Marcia's. Though, as her husband will attest, whatever the dish is, it will probably use most of the pots and pans in the house to make. Much to Bruce's chagrin, Marcia has a talent for using an exceptional amount of tools for most things she cooks. And I'm completely fine with that. When she feeds her friends and family this well, we really have no right to complain.

Some nights, dinner at Adriana's parents' house will consist of roast chicken. Sometimes you'll be in for a feast of fresh pita bread. And there will always be ample vegetables, the kind that make you moan and wonder how people can categorically dislike them. When you taste the vegetables Marcia makes, vegetable-hating will seem like blasphemy.

One of my favorite things about dinner at Marcia's house is the way she brings history and folklore into the foods she makes. Back when we were in junior high and Marcia was studying Arabic, many of her recipes came directly from her closest Middle Eastern friends. Marcia would tell you with great enthusiasm how the dish was usually made and how it came about historically. When she makes traditional American foods, you'll find her kitchen table littered with old books on colonial cooking. You'll wonder how she found these books, but then you'll realize that that's just the kind of person she is. And when she serves a sourdough bread, she's sure to regale you with tales of different starters and their history through the generations.



So it was that Marcia served Colcannon, my new obsession this winter. She told me it was Irish, which made sense, because it consists almost entirely of potatoes and cabbage. I wondered aloud at how incredibly, comfortingly sweet it tasted on my tongue, and she told me matter-of-factly that it was because she boiled the cabbage in milk. I tried very hard to memorize that nonsensical-sounding name of this new food, and then I returned home and started Googling.

It turns out Colcannon is a wonderfully flexible dish. As Marcia said, it's Irish, and it usually consists of potatoes, cabbage or kale, milk or cream, and butter. Some recipes add diced ham to the mix, or onions, scallions, or garlic. I make it my own way, and this includes keeping the potato skins on, because I love potato skins. No matter how you make it, it will almost surely turn out delicious. It will be the sort of simple food that you want to eat out of a bowl on Friday after a long work week. It will also be the sort of thing that you want to serve alongside corned beef, with a hearty scoop of sauerkraut. It will be the sort of dish that reminds you that there are people behind each recipe, and behind those people, wonderful cultures with absorbing histories.



Colcannon
Serves at least 6 as a side dish


6 yukon gold or red potatoes
6 leaves of cabbage, very roughly chopped
1/2 cup whole milk
4 Tb. butter
Salt and pepper to taste

Clean the potatoes very well, then place them in a pot and almost cover with water. Put the lid on the pot, bring to a boil, and boil for 45 minutes, or until the largest potato is easy to pierce all the way through with a fork.

Meanwhile, melt 2 Tb. of butter in a Dutch oven or heavy-bottomed pot. Add the cabbage and 1/4 tsp. of salt, and saute slowly, until the cabbage has turned bright green and a leaf with the vein gives when pierced with the fork. Add the milk and let the cabbage and milk just barely simmer for five minutes.

Drain the water from the potatoes, and mash them with the fork. Add one Tb. of butter and mash that in. This needn't be mashed perfectly, as the dish is meant to be hearty. Add the milk and cabbage mixture to the pot with the mashed potatoes, and mix thoroughly until the Colcannon is thick and creamy. Add a few grinds of pepper, and salt to taste. Serve with a small well in the middle of each serving, and place a dollop of butter there to melt.

-Kylie

learning curve

The title of this blog, or at least the title of the half of the posts that I write, should probably be called If I Can Do It, So Can You. I sometimes feel inept in the kitchen, especially when trying to improvise. Each time I end up with a perfectly done, balanced and beautiful dish, it seems something of a miracle that it emerged from beneath my hands. This is especially true with meat. When I say meat, I mean the flesh of all living things. Red meat, chicken, pork, and fish. Oh, fish; especially you. You name it, I've destroyed it with a wayward recipe interpretation or extra flick of the spice jar.

When Mary and I first started dating, I tried to impress her with my culinary prowess. I had never had a girlfriend before, and I was convinced I was going to do it right, the whole having a girlfriend thing. I was going to be a gourmet lesbian. Mary told me her favorite food was pork, so I searched for the easiest pork recipe I could find. That recipe included a couple of pork chops from a Manhattan grocery store, a packet of dehydrated onion soup mix, and . . . (wait for it) . . . apple sauce. You think I'm kidding? I'm not. After  a few choked-down bites, it was clear that Mary was in it for more than my nonexistent pork-cooking skills. We scrapped the rest of that meal, and I didn't make pork again for a few years.



Another unfortunate meat incident received the very appropriate label of "Cinna-beef". I had purchased some grass-fed ground beef from the co-op, so things were looking good when it all began. We set out to make our trusty standby of ground beef tacos, tried and true. Unfortunately, fate intervened. I had read an interview with Rick Bayless of recent Top Chef Masters fame, in which Chef Bayless pronounced that the addition of cinnamon made Mexican cuisine unique. That night, after I added the spices to the beef, it was still lacking flavor. We had run out of chile powder. And so I thought immediately of the Vietnamese cinnamon we had recently purchased on a trip to Seattle. And Rick Bayless. And I sprinkled that cinnamon in, effectively ruining what could have been a week's worth of delicious taco lunches. The unfortunate part of all of this was that I knew how nutritious (and expensive) this beef was. I still ate it (cinnamon flavor and all) for lunch each day that week. We still haven't had tacos since then. Mary feels we need to put some distance between the Cinna-beef incident and subsequent taco creations, and I can't help but agree.

Then there was that time when I bought the cheapest fish at the farmers' market. To be honest, I don't remember what it was called. I just remember that it took all my might to eat half of it. From that experience I learned not to buy the cheapest fish at the farmers' market. There's probably a reason it's the cheapest.

In between all these culinary learning opportunities, there have been some wild successes. The good thing is that successes seem to happen in direct proportion to the supposed failures. I try to remind myself whenever I feel like a total hack that the kitchen disasters are what make the successes possible. They also make you feel great when you make something you actually consider palatable, like I did the other day. What makes that success even better? When your girlfriend loves it, and you can finally say you successfully made pork that was delicious.

With all this in mind, I'd like to reiterate: If I can do it, so can you. Go forth and try to braise some pork shoulder the next time you have a few hours to spend near the kitchen.



On a surprisingly related note, remember last week when we invited you to comment on our post to win one of three books, and then the comments didn't work? Yeah, I remember that, too. Comments are actually fixed now, for real. This technology thing can be a bit like meat, and sometimes you need practice to get it right. We'd like to invite you again to comment here. We'll then pick someone randomly to receive a copy of Fat, Ratio or Super Natural Cooking.

Now. What's today's motto? "If I can do it, so can you." That's right, kids.

-Kylie