Eating Our Cow

As Hash

At this pace, it will take a while to eat 1/2 cow. My wife and I battle over buying more freezer meat, especially when offered 1/2 lamb and 1/2 pig from the Wettstein's. "We don't have room," she sez. "We save so much money," I say. "The kidz don't like lamb." "We do." In a moment of relenting, I ordered more meat, the lamb. We have not, however, made any more dents in the freezer supply.

We had a good deal of sirloin roast left from the other night. My wife knew exactly what to do with it, make hash. She's started a new job, making pies professionally. She now works Sunday and Monday nights. These have become the nights now, for frying in the Bungalow.

Here's an approximation of the VI hash recipe:

Find the least grottiest potatoes in the cellar, scrub off star-shaped growths, boil--in this case I used purple potatoes from Driftless Organics, purchased in Madison a few weeks ago. Cube after boiled to barely soft. While the potatoes boil, chop up one keeper onion, sweat in a cast iron pan with some grapeseed oil. Cube the leftover sirloin, ditching the sinewy parts. Add the meat and potatoes and more oil to the pan. Hard fry to crust. Flip and turn. Fry. Add a knob of butter. Mix. Flip. Turn. Season aggressively with salt and pepper, use more fresh ground pepper than you can imagine. Serve.

With the hash, we had a bread salad made from stale Gonnella and squishy tomatoes--an alchemy, old tomatoes and drecky bread makes for a delicious salad. The key to a bread salad is to give the bread time to absorb the tomato juice, plus the juice of 1/2 lemon, a heavy hand of kosher salt helps the liquids flow. I also added a few mashed cloves of garlic. I would have used a jalepeno, but what was in the house was spoiled. After that absorbtion time, I added Vicki's mint, basil and arugula, fresh mozz from the Farmer's Market, and Italian olive oil. Strawberries for dessert. We sat on the couch and watched Mythbusters while we ate.