Sure and everyone’s Irish on St. Paddy’s day! Just like everybody’s a cowboy at the stock show, Mexican on Cinco de Mayo, Czech at the Kolache Festival, and German at the wurstfest! We Texans are blessed with cultural diversity, and that extends to our food!

Question: what did the Irish eat before the 16th century explorers brought home the potato? (For that matter what did Italians do before tomatoes!?) My guess – cabbage.

When you put them together you get the famous (or not) Irish dish: Colcannon! I first had it when my buddy Dan Roper (now there’s an Irish name) brought it to one of our chuck wagon gatherin’s.

3–4 Irish (OK, Idaho) potatoes
1 head of cabbage
1 onion (or better some chopped green onions or scallions – whatever they are?)
1 stick of butter
1 cup of milk (or cream)
Salt and pepper
Ham and/or bacon

We like our potatoes with their skins, so I put them in the pot to boil about half an hour. You can peel him if you want to. Then in another pot, boil salted water and drop in chunks of cabbage long enough to wilt. Squeeze out as much water as possible, put one third of butter in and let it melt. Drain the taters and keep’em on low flame to dry out some. Add another 1/3 stick of butter, a cup of milk, the green onions chopped, and mash it by hand. Then add the cabbage, salt and pepper and small bits of ham and/or bacon to flavor. Finally put the last 1/3 stick of butter on it to melt and mix it all together.

We like it warm, but it’s pretty good the next day out of the fridge!

Éirinn go Brách!