Inside-Out Colcannon

Local corned beef, as I've mentioned before, is different from what the rest of the world considers corned beef. And imported corned beef happens to have a rather steeper price as well, so I figured that beef loaf would be a decent substitute that was close enough to what this recipe is kind of sort of supposed to be...

I was inspired by learning about stuffed cabbage, which is actually a misnomer because it's less that the cabbage itself is hollowed out and stuffed, and more like the leaves are used for a wrap.

Colcannon is mashed potatoes with bacon and something green. There are recipes out there, the pages often padded with comments about how it's a peasant dish so it should only have bacon bits on a special occasion, absolutely no cream or butter because that'd make it to rich and inauthentic, and curly kale instead of cabbage, and whoever wrote the recipe had probably never really had real colcannon...

Where I live, curly kale is extremely expensive if I can even find any kale at all. I consider it very authentically peasant-like to just work with what I can get. Cabbage it is!

Still, here's the major downside to getting interested in exotic food. Even if the exotic ingredients don't exceed my budget, I can never really be sure to have gotten it right flavor-and-texture wise.

So...I'm not even really trying. I'm now just going for something probably vaguely Irish maybe.

Oh, and baby potatoes are always a better idea before I actually have to cook with them...I had to scrub the ones pictured above, with a toothbrush. Still, once they've been washed and chopped, I put the double boiler of my rice cooker to use...

When the potatoes begin to soften, maybe about 8 minutes of steaming, I add the cabbage leaves...

And leave them to fully cook:

Meanwhile, slice and crisp up the beef (corned, loafed, baconed...whichever...)

Here are the ingredients, ready to be assembled:

I put some potatoes on a cabbage leaf, topping it with meat...

...Still being very Asian and using chopsticks instead of just rolling it with my fingers. Well, the cabbage was hot, and it didn't need to be hand-molded into something that would hold its shape, actually, cabbage wraps tend to take care of themselves as it turns out...which was good, because with tortilla wraps or lumpia wraps they sometimes need a line of cornstarch mixed with water to stop them from unraveling. I wondered if I might have to figure out a way to do something like that with cabbage leaves, but it was no problem.

I'd made more than 3, but I kept eating them.