Sausage and colcannon, anyone?

A week ago Tuesday our on-site resident from my study abroad program, Claire, came to our apartment to cook us a traditional Irish meal. Okay, so she didn’t do all the cooking, but most of it because we were “learning”, of course. She came up with like 3 huge grocery bags, and it was all for just five of us! She’s such a sweetheart anyways, I’m really lucky to have such a great program resident. So she purchased an array of Irish things, including:

- Sausages from Clonakilty (someone in her family actually started the business!)
- Tanora, a tangerine soda that you can only get in Cork County
- Tayto “crisps”, which are potato chips in the US
- Spuds, aka potatoes, haha
- Onions
- Irish chocolate bars
- Cabbage
- Apple crumble for dessert
- Black and white pudding
- And all the other ingredients needed for our meal.

Our meal was titled “sausage and pudding with colcannon”. Basically, colcannon is mashed potatoes with onion and cabbage in them. Pudding over here, is NOT like Jello pudding… It’s a sausage-looking-type-thing that is made from the guts of the pig. Oh and the difference between black and white pudding, is that there is blood in the black pudding. Yeah. Luckily I didn’t know what it was before I ate it.

So once we prepared all the ingredients, we started cooking. Like I said, Claire did most of it, but she gave us some tips and showed us generally how to do it. One interesting thing about the ovens over here (besides the fact you have no freaking idea what temperature things are because it’s in Celcius…) is that there is a grill in the top part of the oven. So yes, you can have a barbeque inside your kitchen if you please. So we grilled the sausage and “pudding” and worked on the colcannon, gravy, and home-made whipped cream for the dessert. It was a really great time, and let me tell you, the food was AMAZING. I loved everything we had, and it still has been one of the best meals I’ve had in Ireland so far.

After dinner we forced down dessert (we were reallllly full) and then had a mini-photo shoot with Claire. She’s just the best. She even let us keep all the extra stuff, so we ended up with a half a bag of spuds, tons of onions, vegetable oil, soda, candy bars, and all the actual leftovers. Wish you all could have joined our meal!

Here are some pictures of our Irish meal cooking experience!


 Claire!






♥  Danielle Lynn