Potatoes deserve to be piled high next to thin slices of corned beef for this year’s St. Patrick’s Day celebration. Ever so versatile, potatoes offer big satisfaction for the buck. These days we eat them rarely in favor of less carby offerings. Not so, on one of our favorite food holidays.
We’ll boil and then butter little red potatoes to serve with our breakfast eggs. Perhaps these boiled potatoes will be seasoned with mayonnaise and green pepper for a lunchtime salad. Dinner plans definitely include a mash-up littered with bits of meltingly-soft cabbage.
Darina Allen, an Irish cooking school owner and author, teaches us that potatoes mashed with cabbage or kale are known as colcannon. Reminiscent, she writes in her seminal “Forgotten Skills of Cooking” (Kyle Books, 2009) of “champ,” a popular dish in the North of Ireland made from green onions (fresh peas in the summer), butter and mashed potatoes….