Hearty fare for cold weather

Hugh's Gardens organic potatoes

This post authored by Penny Hillemann (penelopedia).

Potatoes and cabbage (or kale), mixed together with or without meat, make a simple, satisfying supper that would be familiar in one form or another to many of our thrifty forebears. Potatoes and cabbage both keep well under proper storage conditions, and so they are staples of a traditional winter diet in northern countries.

Variants of the dish are known in England as Bubble and Squeak, in Ireland as Colcannon, and in the Netherlands as Stamppot, to name a few. With more emphasis on meat and less on cabbage, it’s also very familiar to Americans as hash. Traditionally, any of these dishes were a good way to use up leftover potatoes, green vegetables and/or meat, but there’s certainly nothing wrong with making them fresh.

In the English version I’m most familiar with, you combine mashed potatoes and cooked cabbage (which my mother always cooked lightly, rather than boiling it to death), season with salt, pepper, butter and perhaps some milk, and then fry as a large patty until nicely browned on both sides. It could be served with leftover meat from the Sunday roast (in the days of the Sunday roast), or with sausages, or on its own, perhaps with some grated cheese.

I went at this in a different way last night, not wanting to separately cook the cabbage beforehand. I used delicious organic yellow potatoes (from Hugh’s Gardens in Moorhead, Minn., purchased at Just Food), which I cut into large dice and cooked in the microwave in a covered dish with some water for a few minutes until almost tender. I had a small cabbage, also from the co-op but probably not local in this case, which I cut into wedges and then cut across to get 2-3″ strips. I added the cooked potatoes, the raw cabbage, and some cut-up fully-cooked sausage (in this case, red-pepper-and-garlic chicken sausages from the co-op, but more local options are certainly available) to a hot frying pan with some butter and canola oil and sauteed the mixture, stirring regularly, until the cabbage was tender and the potatoes and sausage were browned. My skeptical husband, fearful of cabbage after being raised on a weekly calendar of “boiled dinner,” declared it good and said he would certainly eat it again.

There are almost endless variations. Try heating some milk with diced onion or leeks to boiling, then mashing that with the potatoes and cooked vegetables (try carrots and/or turnips for another variation) and beating until creamy — that’s a typical approach to the Irish Colcannon. Bake your mashed mixture in the oven with some grated cheese on top, and that’s a Scottish version, delightfully called Rumbledethumps.

With local potatoes and sausage (consider bratwurst from Lorentz meats from Cannon Falls) and other vegetables that might or might not be available locally at this time of year, you have a quick, inexpensive, satisfying supper that easily meets the 50% local goals of the Winter Eat Local Challenge.