Corned Beef Hash

Corned Beef Hash is one of those things; you either like it or hate it. For me, it's a reminder of warm winter’s evenings, of being young and anyway the taste of crisp semi burnt onions does it for me any time.

So here’s a foolproof hash method. The proportions are fairly flexible, for 320g of Corned Beef I used two medium onions and three medium potatoes. I always peel my potatoes thickly,

 then part fry the peels and freeze. They make great oven chips!

I digress, back to the hash.

First peel your potatoes and boil, while that’s going on you can fry some chopped onions and a little garlic paste till they start to soften.

Add the corned beef, broken up into small chunks, and mix well. Leave it to fry gently until the onions and beef start to crisp up on the base of the pan.

When the potatoes are soft, mash with milk, a little (to taste) butter and some grated strong cheese. Oil an ovenproof dish and mix the mash and the beef/onion mixture together. Chill.

Bake for about 30 minutes at 180 degrees, serve and enjoy.

As I said yesterday, I tried Hortense again and the loaves rose fairly well overnight.

On baking they are an improvement on the last attempt, but the sourdough has still not developed enough to give a good crumb.

It's very edible though, just won’t win any prizes. So Hortense needs feeding up a little more, I will give it a few more days and try again. Of course the cold weather is not helping.

Polly at the Black cat posted on Face book last night asking what cake she should make today, the general opinion seems to be Chocolate, but whatever we end up with will be worth it, and we are going in for some anyway, no matter what.

It's actually light enough to take the dogs out at 7am now, and be able to see what they are up to, a sure sign of spring. I just hope the seed potatoes I planted before the cold weather have survived.