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.