Colcannon for St. Patricks day

I know I'm a bit late with posting this one! Celebrations for St. Patrick's day tend to revolve around drinking and many on-line recipes I found were just ways of colouring food green. I wanted to cook something Irish so turned to Darina Allen's Forgotten Skills of Cooking. Allen runs the Ballymaloe cookery school in Ireland so covers all the classic Irish dishes in her book. I settled on Colcannon which is basically mashed potato and cabbage (bit like unfried bubble and squeak). There are a couple of interesting suggestions in Allen's recipe though. One is to cook the potatoes in their skins and then peel  them before mashing. I do find cooking in their skins retains more of the potatoes' flavour but combined with the suggestion to mash the potatoes while they are still hot led to some interesting manoeuvres involving forks and tea towels and still burning my fingers!

See here for Allen's Colcannon recipe. I used spring greens from my veg bag, stripped from the stalks and finely chopped they worked well. I served it with a vegetable stew so made good use of the veg bag.

Leek and potatoes

Part of my day job is to collect True Food's weekly order of veg from Tolhurst Organic Produce. When I was there last Thursday I commented that that leeks looked good "We've got too many leeks and potatoes" was the reply. So when thinking about what to have as a light Sunday lunch (you know something to keep you going between cooked breakfast and roast dinner) I thought I'd do my bit to use up the leek and potato mountain.

While the potato was in the microwave I finely chopped the leek and gently fried in butter and olive oil. Added black pepper and dried rosemary and once the leek was softened stirred in a tablespoon of grated Parmesan cheese and a desert spoon of cream (just because I happened to have some in the fridge!).

Well used Squash

I had a red Kuri squash in last week's veg bag and it made me 2 solo dinners and 2 lunches. Tuesday was stuffed squash. I started off by roasting it, cut in half  and placed  cut side down on a baking tray. I have made the mistake before of trying to cook the squash from scratch with the stuffing in and it doesn't work - the filling is burnt before the squash is cooked - I had to scrape out the stuffing and carry on cooking the squash.

This time I was very organised I made the filling  - puy lentils, finely chopped carrots and leek and  some Za'atar (a Palestinian herb mix) - and roasted the squash the day before. Then when I got in from a meeting on Tuesday evening all I had to do was put them together and turn on the microwave, the perfect ready meal.
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I had some spare filling and left over mashed potato for lunch on Wednesday and then made a risotto with the other half of the roasted squash. Squash is fantastic in risotto, I put it in quite early on as you can see from the photo so that it melted right down into the rice. It had a rich creamy texture and although I had some Parmesan ready it really didn't need it. With spare risotto for lunch on Thursday pretty good value from one squash.