Nouveau colcannon: a recipe

Photo by Alexander Hausmann, via the stock.xchng

As regular readers of this blog know, some dishes just don't photograph well.

Case in point: this dish I've dubbed "nouveau colcannon" because calling it what it is -- mashed cannellini beans and potatoes with blue cheese and sausage crumbles and spinach -- is just too absurdly long.

Colcannon, by definition, is a traditional Irish dish made with potatoes and cabbage or kale, often with other stuff like ham, bacon or onion thrown in for good measure. Very casserole-y.

Nouveau colcannon is just another recipe I modified heavily from Mark Bittman's awesomely awesome Food Matters Cookbook, to make it more filling and appealing to the meatasaurus in me.

Well, appealing to the taste buds, I should say. Because pretty it's not.

The end product wound up looking like something that even Oliver Twist would have turned up his nose at, which is why I have instead included a lovely stock photograph of blue cheese with this post.

But come come ... we who love food do NOT judge a book by its cover. Or at least we try not to. This dish was not only simple and quick, the flavors are unreal! UNREAL, I tell you! Creamy and hearty and tangy all at once, thanks to the blue cheese.

If you even remotely like blue cheese, I urge you to give this one a try.

Maybe use a nice pretty bowl for serving to make up for the homeliness.

Nouveau Colcannon (adapted from Mark Bittman's Food Matters Cookbook)

Ingredients
4 oz. sweet italian sausage (removed from casing)
1 large baking potato, cooked
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary or 1 teaspoon dried
1 15-oz can cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
1/4 cup half-and-half
1/2 cup crumbled blue cheese
2 big handfuls of baby spinach
Salt and pepper

Directions
Bake or microwave the potato until tender. Once cool, peel and chop.

Heat a frying pan and add the sausage -- cook until done, about 5-6 minutes. Add the garlic and rosemary and cook for about a minute. Then add the beans, potato, half-and-half, Gorgonzola, and a splash of water.

Using a potato masher, mash the beans and potato and stir the mixture, gradually adding a little more water if it seems too thick. Once it is hot and reached a consistency you like, mix in the spinach and stir until slightly wilted. Add salt and pepper to taste.