Good morning. I'm Stephanie Alexander and this morning I'm going to make a version of colcannon, which is a traditional Irish dish made with mashed potato and chopped greens, and usually kale. Kale is not a very common green vegetable, but it's perfect for this dish. And I'm using Carisma potatoes, which are exclusive to Coles, and I'm adding my own little tweaks with a bit of spice.
Now to prepare kale, the stem is very tough and you don't use it. Cut these away, all these little frilly bits. These leaves will get a very rough chop, and then I'm going to put them into some cold water. Here I've got my cooked potatoes, and I'm now going to turn them into a beautiful mash.
Now I want to tell people about a potato ricer. If you don't have a potato ricer, you need to get one. For anyone who loves mashed potato, this is foolproof, and makes the most beautiful mash. What you do is you spoon a reasonable amount of potatoes into the little hopper. Not too many, you don't want it too full. Put the bits back like that and you bring the two handles together and look what happens. Perfect mashed potato comes out.
So now I'm going to pretty up my mashed potato. I've got my butter and milk here. I have one very lightly beaten egg and some chopped spring onions. So, in it goes. Beautiful. I start with a spoon. In with the egg. Some chopped spring onions including plenty of the green part. There we have the mashed potato.
Now all it's waiting for is it’s spicy greens. Okay, so now I'm going to tart up my kale. I've got some hot oil in the pan here and I'm adding some ginger, closely followed by some finely chopped garlic. Let that have a bit of a sizzle.
Next thing that goes in is a combination of ground cumin and ground coriander and, because I like a little bit of spice, I'm adding a smallish amount of hot green chilli. All of that gets cooked together for just about less than a minute in a way, and then I take handfuls of my washed greens and drop them into this mixture with the water that's on the leaves. Quick stir and then I turn the heat down a bit and cover them tightly, so that they partly steam and partly braise. No more than three or four, maybe five minutes.
Okay, so now I've got this beautifully shiny, spicy greens, which I'm going to stir into the mashed potato and then it needs to get really cold before I can make my little patties. And I'm going to taste it for seasoning. Definitely need salt. Now into the refrigerator to get completely cold.
And now I take reasonable sized spoonfuls of my mixture and I'm going to drop them into this flour mixture and try to turn them into sort of little patties. I find fingers and hands are quite useful for this. And then they sit on a tray until I've done as many as I need. I'm frying my patties in a non-stick pan using clarified butter which gives a lovely flavour and gets beautifully hot without burning.
Turn the last one, and because some people like to have their colcannon patties served with an egg, I've actually fried an egg and we'll put them together on the serving plate. Okay, well, I'm pretty happy with my little colcannon potato cakes. And that's a lovely breakfast, probably a bit too generous, and the Carisma potatoes have performed very, very well.