Hello everyone!
Welcome back to another edition of Yesterday’s Curry, my newsletter in which I document my ongoing research into Goan cooking, the cuisine of my heritage. As some of you may be aware as well as being half Goan, I am also half Irish. This week’s newsletter will be something a little different as I share an Irish-Goan fusion recipe I’ve been working on this week to celebrate St Patrick’s Day which was a few days ago on the 17th March. I don’t generally cook a lot of Irish dishes, but growing up there was one dish in particular we would eat a lot, something which my Irish Grandmother made every time we visited her; bacon and cabbage. It may sound unassuming, but this is a really tasty dish which consists of boiling a joint of boiling bacon (gammon is all the shops seem to have these days), steaming some savoy cabbage, and serving with buttery mash. During the lockdown when I last ate it, there were lots of leftovers which I turned into a hash the next day and that sparked the idea for today’s recipe. One of my absolute favourite Goan dishes is potato chops. For those of you that don’t know (ie the non Goan contingent of my readers) potato chops are a Goan snack of mash potato with a mince meat filling, coated in either breadcrumbs or semolina and then fried. Combining 2 of my favourite things my recipe for bacon and cabbage potato chops is a combination of Goan spiced savoy cabbage mixed with shredded gammon and mashed potato and coated in fine semolina.
So without further ado, here is the recipe: