13 Feb irish breakfast

There are few luxuries we enjoy more than a leisurely breakfast on a bright morning. Breakfast is one of our favourite meals of the day and we love being able to take our time over the making and eating of it. Our Irish Breakfast makes use of three key local ingredients to create a healthier alternative to a big old fry up.

Traditional Irish potato cakes are usually made through a combination of mashed potatoes, flour and milk. While they are delicious – and here’s a gorgeous recipe to prove it – they can be on the heavy side and we tend to prefer our version of the crispy fried potato latke for their lightness. We used Keogh’s Farm rooster potatoes for our breakfast recipe.

We can’t get enough of kale and, luckily for us here in Ireland, it loves growing on this island. We don’t tamper with it very much in this recipe and decided to let its zingy greenness speak for itself. We cook it with Derrycamma Farm’s deliciously flavoured and golden-hued rapeseed oil – and a good, healthy knob of butter.

Our favourite breakfast eggs come from my auntie Nuala’s chicken coop but when we can’t get our hands on those golden yolk beauties, Co Carlow’s organic and free-range eggs from Butler’s are a great runner-up. We love our eggs poached (our trick is to add a drop of white wine vinegar to the boiling water to help the eggs keep their shape) but you can choose your own egg adventure for this breakfast.

what you need for a forkful of irish breakfast for 2

For the potato latkes

2 large potatoes (Roosters or Maris Pipers are a good fit)

1 small onion

Salt 

Pepper

2 tablespoons of rapeseed oil

For the rest of the brekkie

A few big bunches of lovely kale

The juice of half a lemon

Rapeseed oil

Butter

2 eggs

Drop of white wine vinegar

Salt 

Pepper

Start by peeling the spuds. Roughly grate the spuds into a big bowl.

Wrap the spuds in a clean tea towel and squeeze the bejaysus out of them to get rid of the excess liquid. This will help the latkes stick together when frying. If you don’t have a clean tea towel (no judgement here), use a colander to squeeze the moisture out of the grated spuds and return to the bowl.

Grate in the onion. Season with salt and pepper and drizzle with the rapeseed oil before mixing well.

Heat another drizzle of oil and butter in a large frying pan.

Use your  hands to make little potato cakes (latkes) out of potato mixture and fry, until golden on both sides. Keep warm in a gently heated oven while you do another batch. You should get 6 to 8 little cakes out of your grated potatoes.

Keep all latkes warm in oven while you cook the kale.

Slice the kale into long thin shreds, removing the leaves from the inner stalk.

Heat more oil and butter in your frying pan and add the kale.

Season with salt and pepper and squeeze in lemon juice.

Cook until softened slightly and the kale has taken on a bright green hue – about 5 minutes should do it.

Poach your eggs by brining a saucepan of water to a bubbling simmer. Throw in a dash of white wine vinegar and gently break the eggs into the bubbling water. Cook for 4 minutes for a soft yolk before transferring from the water to kitchen towel with a slotted spoon. If you’re a little wary of poached eggs, here are a few tips on how to make them happen.

Put your latkes on the plate, followed by some luscious leaves of kale and top with your soft poached egg finished with a final sprinkling of salt and pepper.

Thank you to Ensemble Ériu for the use of their beautiful track which perfectly soundtracks our irish breakfast. Find out more about their minimalistic jazz influenced take on traditional Irish music by buying their stunning eponymously titled debut here.