Wednesday's Dinner: Wermlands Colcannon

[akirlu]

Not precisely colcannon. Not precisely pyttipanna. Somewhere in the middle, but hearty eats for a chill evening.

3 Slices extra thick double-smoked bacon
1/2 Hillshire Farms smoked snausange
5 large Yukon Gold potatoes
1 large onion
1/2 small cabbage
8 T duck broth
2 T balsamic vinegar

Clean potatoes and cut into large chunks. Place in a large-enough pot with cold water to cover. Add a dash of salt and set on high to boil. When it boils, cover and turn down heat to simmer for 15 minutes. Check doneness with a toothpick -- pick should pass through easily without crumbling the potatoes. Drain and set aside.

While the potatoes are heating, take kitchen shears and cut bacon slices into small-diced size bits and put into dutch oven over medium heat to brown. Slice sausage and add to bacon once bacon is browned.

Slice cabbage and onion to fine ribbons. Turn down heat under the browned meats and add cabbage and onion to dutch oven. Add a dash of salt and sweat the vegetables, stirring occasionally. When the cabbage is softened, add broth and vinegar, grind in fresh pepper to taste, stir in potatoes and turn heat to low. Cook covered until all liquid is absorbed (5-10 minutes), stirring occasionally. Dish up and serve, preferably with a cold lager.

Unlike most proper colcannon recipes, I didn't boil the cabbage or mash the potatoes, and I may add carrots to the potatoes next time for extra veg variety. Rutabaga would probably work too, or turnip. I'm sure whatever broth or stock is handy would be fine -- I just happened to have some leftover from the duck. I should probably use up the rest tonight and make soup -- duck soup!

Comments

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Possibly this was my inspiration for making a very nice fish chowder tonight with the halibut I bought (which turned out not to have been scaled, but that's a different story). Bacon, onions, potatoes, then the paths diverge. Yum, in any case.

I did buy cabbage, but that's for the borscht.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

It's hard to go far wrong if you start with bacon, onions, and potatoes. Maybe next time I'll go for fish chowder, myself.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

the post right above yours was titled:

"Giant Sea Worm Unmasked as Coral Killer"

my brain made an instant connection with "wermlands" and "dinner". ew. :)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Still not ready for the Diet of Worms? Well, arguably, neither was Luther.

(And all because I was too lazy to use an umlaut -- the modern spelling of my home county is "Värmland.")

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this -- I have one cabbage ready to harvest, and about a dozen more coming along. That's really going to be (cabbage-worms permitting, & there's no evidence of them yet) much more cabbage than one person (or at least I) can use. Of course I'll give some of them away, but.... (Making sauerkraut is more hassle than I want to go through, thanks.)

And this weekend I'll try a Russian style (with cabbage) Borscht. My oldest planting of beets ('Chioggia') is holding up well (possibly because not adequately thinned), but a few days ago the lady with the Community Garden plot next to mine put some enormous starting-to-bolt beets on the compost pile, from which I rescued some of them. Peeled, grated, boiled with a diced potato, pureed with the blender-on-a-stick, thinned a bit with milk, and with a dollop of sour cream stirred in a couple of them made quite a good borscht. As did a version with additional carrot, onion, and small head of aged cauliflower.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Ah, homegrown vegetables. I'll get there eventually. But first I will have to dig all the damned rocks out of my yard. That, or build new raised beds. Come to think of it, new raised beds would probably be less work. My yard has a *lot* of rocks. Often the size of muffins.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Yup, there's a kind of Primal Satisfaction about home-grown vegetables -- even though most of them don't taste much better than store-bought ones, are probably more expensive if you use strict accounting practices, and are (I'm discovering) really difficult to schedule so they keep maturing just about as fast as they can be used. (Currently, I have so many lettuces that I'm feeling Guilty about not having a salad for breakfast every morning, but really, two large tossed-salads per day is plenty.)

Muffin- (or even Troll-bread-) size rocks aren't as much of a problem as "requires at least two people to lift" ones, but yeah, new raised beds with imported good topsoil at least a foot deep would be less work ... though they'd require a substantial financial outlay.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

It's the "good topsoil at least a foot deep" part that I suspect would really run up the cost. Oh, well, I guess I'll go back to digging up rocks. The soil itself looks to be quite good stuff, and full of worms. Maybe a bit on the clay side, in consistency but black and loamy as well.

[jophan.livejournal.com]

Ah, Ye Olde Wermland Put-in-Cannon!

Sounds yummy, with ye olde traditional balsamic vinegar and all.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I am nothing if not an iconoclast. Think of it as Eurofusion. But in fact, it was quite yummy, which is why I posted the recipe -- in hopes of remembering just what I did the next time I want to do it. (The downside to cooking ad hoc is that I don't always remember from one instance to the next just what the heck I did.)

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I expect to try it tomorrow, with some substitutions -- ordinary bacon, ground turkey rather than sausage, red potatoes, and trotter-sauce rather than duck broth. (If "trotter-sauce" is the right term -- a few pounds of pig's feet and an onion, simmered (in enough water to cover) for at least twelve hours, to make a stock satisfyingly high in gelatin & mouth-feel.)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I have never made trotter-sauce, so I have no opinion on its proper name, but I may just pick up a batch of pigs feet the next time I see them in the market, and try it out myself.