Double Kale Omelette Roll and Colcannon

I promised you two tied-together kale recipes yesterday. And here they are!

Last night I made myself a scrappy colcannon with stuff we had in the fridge. And we had a lot of kale. So a lot of kale went in. We didn't have potato though so I don't know if it's still colcannon... Colcannon is the traditional Irish recipe I was talking about yesterday. It's simply mashed potato with either cabbage or kale, with a dab of butter and maybe some scallions and parsley/chives. I may or may not have looked up the proper traditional herbs before I made it so mine turned out quite differently. And because I felt slightly deprived without potatos, I added the traditional dollop of butter (more than what's in the photo, shhh!). I'll just give you a run down of my super-specially-lazy and not-so-traditional colcannon.

Mid-mash

Could this Still be Called Colcannon

Serves as many as you want

Pumpkin

Kale (equal amount as pumpkin, size wise)

Butter

Dump the pumpkin and kale (kale on top) into a pot and fill up with water until it reaches the top of the pumpkin.

Cover the pot and bring it to the boil, then change the heat settings to however your situation is going. Want that Irish goodness right now? Keep it at full boil. Chicken wings still have twenty minutes to cook (my situation tonight)? Turn that knob down as low as possible. Turn it off even, if it mushes up before you want it.

Once the pumpkin is all ready to mash, drain the whole lot.

Then add the butter. As much as you like. Really. Butter is good for you!

And get a fork and mash it all up. Mashing stuff is always quite fun, especially when you've got curly green bits there too.

Of course you could theoretically make this with any root veggie you like. It still wouldn't be a traditional colcannon. But it still makes for a delicious, healthy, kaley dish.

Onto breakfast!

I had a heap of leftover colcannon (from planning) so I designed a really kaley breakfast for myself. It's an omelette with kale cooked in the eggy bit, and then the colcannon stuff is spread onto the omelette, which is then rolled up. Sounds too good to be true? It's not. Just check out these pictures.

The process is pretty simple. Like I touched on before, you get your omelette going in a rectangular pan, and your mash heating up in another.

Look at all that kaley goodness!

Then, once you flip your omelette and cook it like normal, whack it on a plate or something and smear all the mash over more than 3/4 of the rectangle like so:

Just leave a little on the end, because you gotta leave space on the end of stuff when you roll stuff up.

And now you roll that stuff up.

Serve it with a bit of lemon, and take a photo before your first slice. Because that 'slice' won't end up as pretty as you might think. Instead of getting something perfect like this:

...you end up with a squished:

Yeah, not so pretty as before. But it still tastes good!

Double Kale Omelette Roll

Serves 1 pretty hungry person

2 eggs

4 - 5 kale leaves

3 tbsp water

coconut oil or butter

3/4 cup leftover colcannon

more water

Chop up the kale leaves pretty small but still kinda roughly.

Whisk the eggs and the water until combined, and add about 2/3 of the leaves (or 3 kale leaves) to the eggs and mix it all up.

Heat up the colcannon in a small saucepan, add the leftover kale and add enough water for the raw kale to steam and for the pumpkin to not stick to the saucepan. Keep stirring it so it doesn't burn or do anything nasty.

Heat the coconut oil/butter in a rectangular frypan (round would work too, but it wouldn't look as awesome) and pour in the omelette mixture. Cook like a normal omelette.

Once the omelette is cooked, lay it down and spread the kale-added colcannon on the omelette thickly, leaving space at one end.

Roll the omelette up from the colcannony side.

Serve with lots of lemon juice.

By the way, the reason I add lemon to my kale or spinach stuff is because lemons have a lot of citric acid, which reverse the stuff that oxalic acid (in kale and spinach) does in your kidneys. The leaves are cooked, so that removes some of it too. Also, the non-heme iron in leafy greens can't be absorbed without vitamin c, so lemons (and the pumpkin in that colcannon) give you that vitamin c to get more iron than without. Oh, and I just think it tastes good. Think of gozleme. You have that with lemon, so why not something else?

Roasted Grapes

Quick one today!

Ever since I saw this recipe, I've wanted to have a go at roasting grapes. But I never got around to it because I kept forgetting to get grapes so it's just never happened.

And then mum bought a big bunch of grapes.

They weren't red grapes like I'd been picturing to roast with, but since I'd been picking one at a time every time I opened the fridge, I thought I should do something more productive with them than make them waste away like that.

So with my salmony, pumpkiny, radiescheny mess of food I plonked into a roasting dish tonight, I added a bunch of grapes, which I made sure didn't touch my salmon. I don't care what my food looks like, just as long as it doesn't taste so bad.

My oily dish didn't take too long to cook, and I made sure my grapes didn't get too oily (coconut oil, by the way). When it was done, the first thing I tried were these bad boys on top there.

Ignore that orange stuff it's sitting on.

Pumpkin Lasagna? Challenge Accepted.

This afternoon, I asked my friend what I should make for dinner and the response I got (and wasn't expecting) was 'lasagna'. Outside, I said no. Inside, I proclaimed CHALLENGE ACCEPTED! and started brainstorming ideas for veggie-filled lasagnas without pasta. What could I include? Zucchini? Carrot? Tomato? But when my brain turned to 'pumpkin', I had ideas like crazy and knew that that would be what would be made.

The pumpkin was my second challenge. I got it last week and had neglected it because, well, I'd have to cut it up. But today I got home and carved that pumpkin up. He must've been seeking revenge for not being touched for a week, because he was soo hard to get a knife through! Every slice was like an opportunity to lose a finger, a toe or worse. But thankfully all the anger and frustration was all contained in his thick skin so he was a little looser on the inside.



I'd had a really fancy idea for this lasagna and I wanted to make a white creamy sauce only because I knew we had some cauliflower, but when I explained my idea to mum she just whipped up a batch of flour-butter-milk white sauce. Sigh. I wasn't going to try to explain my cauliflower sauce idea tonight so I just let it be. Mums always know how to cook food best, so I let her do it and decided that I'd make my super paleo idea another day.

This is also a bit of an unrecipe in terms of types of food to include. Yes, put pumpkin, but use whatever type you have that's been neglected in the fridge, and I had butternut. Use whatever sort of mince-y, cut-up meat you can get your hands on (I used half roast chicken breast, half pork mince because that was what was available). And feel free to include any other veggies that tickle your fancy in the mix!

Pumpkin 'Lasagna'

Serves 4

350g pumpkin

500g meat of some form that isn't a solid piece of muscle

clove of garlic, minced or chopped finely

some massive handfuls of spinach

2 tbs whole wheat plain flour

1 tbs butter

milk

oil for spraying

Cut the pumpkin up so that you've got slices of pumpkin and not chunks of it, so it's about 5mm thick and as long and wide as possible (mine is about 10cm-15cm long and 5cm wide).

Steam the pumpkin for 10 minutes or until it's cooked a little and isn't going to fall apart when you pick it up.

Meanwhile, cook the meat if it's not already, with the garlic.

While that is all cooking, fry the flour and butter in a small saucepan and whisk until cooked, and add milk while whisking until the sauce reaches the consistency of a thick custard. Add salt if preferred.

Assemble the lasagna: To do this, cover the bottom of a deep pre-lined (oil or baking paper) baking dish with some pumpkin slices until you can't see 97% of the bottom.

Next, grab some spinach leaves and lay them onto the pumpkin.

Then grab the meat and layer it on top until all the spinach is covered by the meat. You might want to squish the layers down a little for this.

Pour some of the sauce on top and make sure it's all spread out and covering everything.

Repeat the assembly order until everything is used up.

Lightly spray the top of the whole thing with a touch of oil so it doesn't burn (I forgot to do this).

Pop the whole lot in a preheated-at-180-degrees oven on fan forced and bake for 15 - 20 minutes or until the sauce is all cooked inside.

Slice with a sharp spatula-type thing and serve.