If you are like Tara and I, then you celebrated St. Patrick’s Day in some way.  For us, that meant homemade corned beef and cabbage last week.  If you ended up making or buying corned beef, you likely had at least a bit of corned beef left over.  I love left over corned beef as it makes great Reuben sandwiches as well as awesome hash.  Often we have breakfast for dinner and this is a dish we would definitely make for dinner.  However, it certainly could be used for brunch or a hearty breakfast.

Traditionally, corned beef hash consists of shredded corned beef with cubed or hash brown potatoes and some onion and served alongside a fried or poached egg.  This dish definitely has all of that, but I tend to take a kitchen sink approach to it in terms of adding additional vegetables.  I like to add greens, peppers, a mix of potatoes, and any other vegetable that I might have on hand that needs to be used.  By preserving the crispy potatoes and corned beef as a base, adding additional vegetables simple adds complexity, color, and more nutrition to the mix.  It also lightens it up.  Make no mistake, this is still a hearty dish.  However, it just is not quite so meat and potatoes focused.

In order to make the potatoes crispy, there are really a number of ways to go.  One, you can cube the potatoes and cut them very small, thus shortening the cooking time in the pan (so that the potatoes brown and crisp at the same time they cook through…otherwise you can end up with browned potatoes that are not cooked through or black potatoes that spent too long in the pan, so they burned).   Another way you can go is to shred or grate the potatoes and then wring out the excess water, which allows for improved browning.  I decided to go a different route and keep the potatoes in relatively larger pieces.  You can do that while at the same time avoid burning them by parboiling them.  That is, cooking them in boiling water for 10 minutes or so (depending on the size of the potatoes) until they are half cooked.  I then dunk them in ice water, which stops the cooking.  From there, you simply dry them off and cut them in larger sized pieces.  This allows the potatoes to finish cooking in the hash pan, browning them as they finish, without risking burning them (or at least reducing that risk).

If you don’t have corned beef or if you don’t care for it, you can certainly use sausage, bacon, ham, or any meat you’d prefer.  If you want to make this a vegetarian meal, skip the meat completely and stick with the vegetables or add cooked beans or lentils at the very end for additional protein, fiber, and flavor.  At any rate, you can’t go wrong with hash and you can certainly make it your own based on your personal tastes while using ingredients you have on hand.

In programming notes, a Reuben recipe using the leftover corned beef is coming tomorrow.  That will be the last of the corned beef for a while and I don’t know about you, but I am definitely glad (though it was good).  Also, later this week a veggie hash with fresh cranberry beans, a Croque Madame recipe, and not too far on the horizon, a double veal chop coupled with spring vegetables in a white veal stock and cognac sauce.  So, stay tuned!  The recipe and more pictures follow after the jump… Continue reading →