My non-stick pan, it transpires, is really nothing of the sort.

This I discovered today, when I used it to make a colcannon-inspired potato cake, fashioned from julienned potatoes and filled with a mix of cabbage and onion. The cake should have had a really rather appealing pattern of golden potato sticks top and bottom. Instead, having resolutely stuck to the not-so-non-stick pan, the result looked like mush. Very tasty mush, I might add, but mush nonetheless. Hmph.

I actually considered not posting about it. In the hotdog-eat-hotdog world of food porn, this dish didn’t exactly have those porn star good looks. But, as I surveyed the dinner plates that had all but been licked clean, I knew that what it lacked in the looks department, it more than made up for in the I-could-eat-a-mountain-of-this stakes. I mean, this was colcannon with crispy bits. I managed to dress what remained of the mush up for the cameras and got on with it.

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