Potato cakes with chard and ... umm... Gubbeen

This recipe is taken from Nigel Slater's Tender Volume I (p.230) and, as Nigel says in his introduction, it is a smartened up variation on the theme of bubble and squeak.  Bubble and squeak has been a favourite of mine for many years and it instantly makes me think of Boxing Day lunch with my folks.  Every year, Mum will fry up all the leftover veg from Christmas Dinner with some gravy and it all gets served  with chips (yes, that is carb overload, but that is partly the point and certainly one of the reasons I enjoy it so much), pickled onions and cold turkey (for those who partake of such things).  This is usually wolfed down before heading off to the Boxing Day football match (or to find a radio to listen to the commentary if we are playing away).  Consequently, any meal involving bubble and squeak, or its cousin, the potato cake, is always going to appeal to me.  I also thought it would make good baby-fare, being soft, malleable, capable of being made in small hand-sized portions, yet suitable for mashing up and spoon-feeding if that proved more interesting.  Baby Bird isn't massively keen on spoon-feeding (she prefers to self-feed or to have Mummy load the spoon and let her get on with it), but sometimes she seems to decide a particular foodstuff is spoon-food and not finger food, even if I had expected it to work the other way round.  I try to just follow her lead.

I digress...

So, potato cakes.  Yes.  As I said yesterday, Brent, the very helpful chap in the deli suggested we try Gubbeen in place of the Taleggio called for in the recipe, a new cheese to me but I was ready to give it a go.    I will concede this dish involved quite a lot of prep for what it is, but I suspect that could be overcome with practice and with not trying to entertain a small baby at the same time as cooking.  However, I enjoyed the end result, and was pleased to find they looked somewhat similar to the picture in the book (although I over-steamed the chard for going on top and mine looked a lot greener).  In particular, I would definitely recommend bothering with the polenta crust and, while the basil oil felt like a faff at the time, the flavour pop was worth it and you can always use the leftovers in other things (simple pasta or salad dressing, pepping up a tomato sauce, base for a pizza, the list goes on).



These slight hiccups did not mar the flavour.  The potatoes were smooth and mellow, the chard has a surprisingly refined taste, less robust than spinach but with a pleasant peppery undertone and the stems remained crunchy (despite over-steaming), as well as delightfully colourful on the plate.  Next time, I should plan a bit more, and make sure I have both red and yellow stems put by for the top.  I do think that Taleggio would have been better here, as I think it may have held its shape slightly more, giving more discrete unctuous blobs of cheese amid the floury mash, whereas the Gubbeen melted a little more and so spread a little more.  However, the texture of the Gubbeen was relatively good and there were definite pools of deliciously pungent cheese to contrast with the mellow potatoes and the fresh pop of the chard and parsley. Overall, the adult contingent of the Experimental Thursday data pool was really rather happy with their dinner.  Baby Bird, on the other hand (and in fairness, not altogether unsurprisingly), was not entirely sure about the whole thing.  However, she did gamely try a few mouthfuls before deciding that Mummy was frankly bonkers and no amount of cheesy sauce was going to sway her into eating any more of this stuff.  So we moved on to yoghurt and chalked it up to experience.  I will make it again though, and I will let her try it again, as I am a big believer in introducing her to all family experiences from the outset and hope that the more variety I introduce her to now, the more she will grow up enjoying food.  Thankfully, she seems to tolerate her Mummy's crazy ideas well, and does at least humour me by trying things.