AMAZING GRAZING~~~~Red Flannel Hash

Some people cook corned beef on St. Patrick’s Day. I’m one of them, although I don’t know why. It’s the only time of year I buy it and other than the first day dinner, it makes lovely sandwiches, and of course, hash.

On this St. Patricks’s Day, Dr. Advice showed up early wearing something green. The temperature was 80 that day, and the only thing green I had was a green turtleneck sweater. The Irish song, “The Wearin’ of the Green” is a lament about the times when the British forbid people to wear green. You need to be careful about those things.

We weren’t Irish, and when as a child I wore green and insisted upon singing all the Irish songs I knew, my grandmother harshly reminded me that “We AREN’T Irish”! as if there might be something wrong with being Irish. Although when Dr. Advice and I traveled in Ireland, we were assured that everyone had a little Irish in them. Singing in an Irish pub on a typically rainy night, with fires burning in a large fireplace and pints of Guinness at hand, you were hoping people thought you were Irish even if you weren’t. The Irish had so much fun. Who else could have thought to name a big rock a “Blarney Stone and make people climb a ladder to the top and then lie on their backs to kiss it?

Grandma to my knowledge never cooked corned beef, but she and my mother made hash from Sunday’s roast beef often. My mother spiked it up by adding cooked beets to the mix which turned it all a devilish shade of blood red and gave it additional flavor. Interesting to ponder: you can make a hash of any meat including chicken.

The quantities depend upon how much meat you have left over,

RED FLANNEL HASH

Corned beef (or roast beef) cut into small chunks and coarsely chop in processor with onion and a couple cooked beets. Hand grate an equal amount of raw potatoes. Heat oil in large frying pan medium hot. Keep flipping hash to get a nice crust. When nearly done, you can put an egg per person on top of hash.

Even your Irish Grandmother would approve.

OATMEAL RAISIN MUFFINS

1 c. oatmeal, 1 cup buttermilk, Mix & soak 30 min
2 eggs lightly beaten
1 cup brown sugar packed (or less)
6 Tbs. melted butter
3/4 cup flour
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
3/4 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/3 cup golden raisins
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Makes 1 dozen

POTATOES AND POINT

How much thought or credit do we give the humble potato? Boiled, baked, fried, mashed, scalloped, put into a salad or pancake, it remains true to itself, satisfying hunger throughout the world.
Nearly every country on earth pays tribute to the potato each day. Before the advent of “healthy eating”, most dinner plates contained the requisite meat, potatoes and gravy.

A Norwegian friend uses an apocryphal story to illustrate how poor they were. Each child was given one potato, and told to point to the light fixture above where a herring was hanging. Thus the meal of “potatoes and point was born”.

The Potato Famine caused the migration of a million Irish during the 1840’s. This sculpture of Annie Moore and her brother stands at the quayside in Cove, Ireland. She was the first Irish girl to go through Ellis Island.

We have mashed potato clouds, Mr. Potato Head, even Marilyn Monroe once posed in a potato sack which didn’t do her any harm, and Dan Quayle didn’t know how to spell potato when he was Vice-President.
The potato farmers moved away from Long Island, New York in the 1940’s due to the same fungus that blighted Ireland’s potato crop a century earlier.

Willian Levitt and other developers like him moved in and built Levittown, one of the first planned neighborhoods of copycat homes, and the American suburb was born on a bed of forgotten potatoes.
Today every market, super or Farmer’s, bursts with tuberous exuberance, red, white, yellow, sweet and even blue.

POTATO PANCAKES

2 cups grated potato
1 cup chopped onion
2 garlic cloves chopped
2 large eggs
2 Tbs. potato starch or flour
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp salt 1/2 tsp pepper
1/4 cup minced scallions

Fry in about 3 Tbs. vegetable oil till nicely browned. Dr. Advice likes applesauce alongside his. A dollop of sour Cream is nice too

I sometimes put all the ingredients except the scallions into the processor about 30 seconds . The texture will be grainy. The pancakes will be quite thin (called criques). Cool on a rack. They can be reheated to crisp up.

THE REDHEADS

Another Lady of the Night  KSR

Red hair is the rarest natural color in humans.  Maybe that is why I so desired having it.  As a teenager I once knelt on our kitchen floor washing my hair in a bucket filled with chamomile tea because someone said it would make my hair turn red.  Alas, no such happening occurred as I emerged with the same natural mouse shade that I went in with.

In various times and cultures, red hair has been prized, feared, and ridiculed.  A common belief about redheads is that they have fiery tempers and sharp tongues.   I have a cousin and a daughter who have red hair and neither fits that description.  Although an aunt, who was a redhead, once said of my daughter that “She doesn’t have that red hair for nothing!”  My husband had several cousins who had red hair and they were all perfectly presentable in polite company.

Another belief is that redheads are more highly sexed and mischievous than the rest, which is also untrue.  Many painters including myself, have exhibited a fascination with red hair.  The Renaissance and pre-Raphaelite artists were notable for their redheads.  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story  “The Red-Headed League” involves a mysterious group of red-headed people.

Queen Elizabeth I of England was a redhead, and during the Elizabethan era in England, red hair was fashionable for women.  In modern times, red hair is subject to fashion trends, and depending which current actor or actress is currently popular it  can boost sales of red hair dye.  To name a few, Robert Redford, Nicole Kidman, Red Skelton or Lucille Ball come to mind.

In Britain, any dislike of red hair may derive from the sentiment that people of Irish or Celtic background, with a greater prevalence of red hair were ethnically inferior.  In America, film and TV programs often portray school bullies as having red hair.  The nicknames “ginger” or “red” distinguishes the recipient as being someone separate from the rest.  Medieval beliefs included moral degeneration, witchcraft and vampirism.

The color red itself, signifies danger, stop, look out  for roadblocks.  Redheadday is the name of a Dutch festival that takes place each September in the city of Breda, the Netherlands.  It is a gathering of people with natural red hair, but is also focused on art related to the color red.

All of which continues to endear myself to red hair. Maybe because it denotes a spirit, or a certain “spit-in-your-eye or “don’t tread on me” attitude that is so appealing.