Week 40: Kale, Chorizo and Potato Hash

The book: Riverford Farm Cook Book

The recipe: p230, "Kale, Chorizo and Potato Hash"

This post would have turned up sooner, but let's be honest, there's no way I was going to fire up the Random Kitchen number generator in its usual Sunday afternoon slot after having run the Royal Parks Half Marathon in the morning. Especially when the prospect of heading straight to Byron for some burger- and milkshake-shaped refuelling was raised instead. Readers, there are times when arcane blog-based cooking concepts simply have to wait.

A few days later and finally ready to face the kitchen again, we encounter a book in serious need of redemption after cursing us with the legendarily bad Spiced Cucumber back in Week 17. This time round, things are looking up right from the first glance at the recipe name, chorizo being famed for its ability to improve any dish. At the same time, I hear the faintest tinkling of warning bells at the mention of kale, an ingredient that tends to challenge my oh-so-Guardianista credentials with its inherent bitterness and toughness, much as I acknowledge its healthy nutritional properties.

And for all I may be a fully paid-up member of the 48%-er liberal elite (and a proud citizen of nowhere), I'm still a northerner, so the Riverford insistence on describing this as a "supper" dish rankles somewhat. Nevertheless, we plough onwards, boosted by the prospect of some hearty potato and chorizo to lift the post-race spirits and soothe those still-tired legs.

The prep: Feeling exceedingly lazy, I buy pre-diced own-brand chorizo instead of the picante Revilla chorizo ring I'd normally grab from the supermarket cooler shelves. (This will turn out to be an error.) Curly kale is abundant and affordable right now, while the fridge is already overflowing with potatoes and onions (thanks, Lewisham Market).

The recipe also makes a serving suggestion that meets with my approval, namely topping off the dish with an egg each. It neglects to include eggs in the ingredient list, however, so I endup overlooking this when doing the shopping. Fortunately, Sam is happy to pop out to the local Tesco Express while I'm in the middle of the cooking phase, returning mere minutes later with half a dozen eggs, a Crunchie and two Wispa Gold. Now that's efficient.

#rungry

The making: The recipe calls for cooked potatoes (cut into 2cm dice), so I start by boiling up a pan of spuds then leaving them to cool on the side.

Pre-chopped as it is, the kale is briefly blanched in a pan of boiling salted water, drained, refreshed in cold water, drained again and squeezed out until it's about as dry as it's ever going to get.

Next, olive oil is heated in a large frying pan and the diced chorizo is added and cooked for ten minutes until lightly browned on all sides. Alarm bells are already ringing here: if there's one thing I know, it's that you tend not to need to add oil to a type of sausage that's only too happy to give up its own, and indeed the pan is positively swimming in the stuff by the time the ten minutes are up.

The chorizo is set aside and a chopped onion and some garlic are cooked in the "chorizo fat" (even the recipe is basically admitting the oil is superfluous now) before the diced potato is added. The heat is turned up so that the potato gets some nice colour in it, and when the chorizo is subsequently returned to the pan, I can't deny that things are starting to look quite promising.

"I'm ready for my close-up now"

The kale is also added at this stage and the mixture is cooked slowly for a further ten minutes until everything is thoroughly heated through.

While this is happening, I turn my attention to the eggs. "Poached", the recipe says. "Bollocks to that", I reply. Like many people, I simply cannot poach eggs. None of the techniques recommended - vortexes of simmering water, the addition of vinegar, Delia's "just take the pan off the heat for ten minutes and let them cook by themselves" approach - have ever resulted in anything other than a disastrous mishmash of water-infused yolk and spindly tendrils of egg white that, while notionally edible, score a big fat nul points on the visual presentation and mouthfeel front.

So fried eggs it is. (One sunny side up, one over easy, just because.) Same end result in terms of the yolky goodness that should hopefully end up running its way through the finished product.

And that's it - the warm contents of the pan are plated up, the eggs are carefully slid on top, and we're ready to fill our bellies.

The eating: Mixed reviews, I think it's fair to say. More so than for almost any Random Kitchen experiment so far. While I wouldn't claim to love it (it's a fairly simple - ahem - suppertime dish, after all), I must be firmly in post-run recovery mode because I'm happy to shovel it into my gob unquestioningly. And then Sam raises several salient points that I find myself unable to dispute:

• It's really quite salty. This is not unconnected to the fact that there's a lot of chorizo in the dish and it doesn't taste of a great deal other than salt. My bad for being a lazy B'Stard and indulging in inferior procurement techniques - back to the Revilla next time.
  
• The kale is really quite bitter. This is a problem I acknowledged right from the get-go, and in the recipe's defence, it does note that any kind of cabbage or even Brussels sprouts would be an acceptable alternative.
• The whole thing doesn't really hang together. OK, it's a hash, so it's always going to be basically "some stuff thrown together in a pan" (actually, this really is just pyttipanna, isn't it?), but some kind of binding ingredient - a bit of grated cheese, something closer to a sauce than mere chorizo oil, or even a "stickier" vegetable such as sliced and soft-fried leeks - would make it feel more coherent.

Even the egg on top is a bit "meh", with the meagre yolk yielding little in the way of the indulgent stickiness I hoped it would. Maybe I should try poaching next time after all - at least that'd give us some visual LOLs.

Steamy fraternal twins

Having said that, Sam does suggest his antipathy might simply be because he's going off chorizo a bit. No, really. He actually said that.

In any case, a mixed bag, all told. Like with the other Riverford recipes I've used outside of the Random Kitchen project, there's a certain basic rusticness to this that manages to be both a positive and a negative. It could do with being more decadent, in other words - I'm thinking a sprinkling of parmesan, at the very least - but it could also do with me buying better ingredients in the first place, so I'm willing to give it another chance with those wrongs righted.

And hey - it's still a damn sight better than the Spiced Cucumber, plus we've got Crunchie and Wispa Gold for afters. Life's okay.

One-word verdict: Polarising.