For my next mashup, I took a cue from the Idaho potato recipe I tackled midway through last year. The allure of various loose ingredients in my pantry, fridge and freezer was just too tempting not to throw together. Potatoes. Bacon. Sweet dried cranberries. Bacon. Corned beef. BBQ sauce. Bacon.
Ahem, did I mention bacon?
Makes 3 to 4 servings
Ingredients (state flag indicates State-by-State post where ingredient was featured. Ingredients with no flag were not specifically used for any one post.)
3 large or 6 small potatoes
4 slices raw bacon, chopped
1/4 cup milk or cream
1/4 c dried berries such as raisins, craisins (pictured), dried blueberries or huckleberries1 T beef tallow (not pictured)few pats (or about 2 - 3 T) butter
1/4 to 1/2 c paneer or cottage cheese
Start a pot to boilin', and boil your potatoes for about 20 minutes, (until they are mashing consistency). Feel free to salt it but I didn't bother.
Melt some bacon grease, oil, butter or - in this case - beef tallow into a skillet.
Fry the bacon and corned beef in the beef tallow. My God, bacon, corned beef AND beef tallow from suet? Honestly, I don't eat like this all the time!
But maybe I should...
Break up the vanocka or another dried fruit-filled bread (or any old bread), and throw it in the food processor.
Keep at it until you have crumbs. Use about 1/4 cup if you just have store-bought ones.
Drain and mash the potatoes.
Next, mash some more with the milk and cheese. It will be a little on the firm side (add a little more milk if you want. Go on, see if I care.)
Next add the meat and berries - it's like pemmican potatoes!
Finally, add a dash or two of BBQ sauce, to taste. Or leave it out. Your choice.
Press it into a Corningware dish, and top with the bread crumbs. I ended up scooping it out and putting it in a shallower dish. Top with the butter and broil it for four minutes.
Er, three and a half minutes. Actually, it looks worse than it was. Only two or three berries on top were singed in the broiler. I just plucked them off and all was good. So four minutes will work.
If you've been following these mashups, you will note that I've had mixed results with these things. This was probably my most successful one: the buttery crunchy bread crumbs on top of moist (YES I SAID IT - MOIST!) potatoes and the sweet craisins and bacon. So far this is the mashup recipe I would most likely do again, proving that you gotta try pretty damn hard to mess up with a combo like potatoes, bacon, berries and butter. And folks, I just didn't feel like putting in that sort of effort.
0 comments:
Post a Comment