Corned Beef Hash and Hornswoggling

American Breakfast

CORNED BEEF HASH

INGREDIENTS

3 medium brown potatoes
1 pound corned beef
1 onion
2 tablespoons butter
2 teaspoons parsley
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/4 cup beef broth or broth from cooking corned beef

PREPARATION

Bake potatoes, keep skins on, at 400 degrees for 40 minutes or until potatoes are soft. Remove potatoes. While potatoes cool, dice corned beef and mince onion. Put onion and butter in large skillet. Sauté onion at medium-high heat for 5 minutes or until it softens. Stir frequently.

Cut potatoes into 1/2″ cubes. Add potato, corned beef, parsley, Worcestershire sauce, pepper, and broth to skillet. Cook on medium heat for 10 minutes or until potato turns golden brown. Stir occasionally. Add broth and cook for another 3 minutes. Stir occasionally.

TIDBITS

1) Reporters once ridiculed Vice President Dan Quayle for misspelling potato. Thank goodness for him he didn’t need to write the word “heteroskedasticity.” Indeed how many reporters can spell that word? Can you spell “heteroskedasticity?” Okay, without looking at this tidbit? Of course, if you weren’t looking at this, you wouldn’t be challenged to spell “hetero…” Oh never mind.

2) Potatoes are used to make French fries at baseball games. However, corned beef hash is not served at any baseball stadium, not even at the single A level. Caviar-and-filet mignon hash might be served at ball parks located in the ritziest of neighborhoods, but I’ve never heard of it.

3) By the way, the word “hornswoggle,” meaning to “bamboozle,” comes from baseball as this excerpt from the novel The Fur West states,

“I loved baseball, too. Timmy played it and so did many of my other friends, Jeb, Bobby, Pete, and Josh, although I didn’t cotton to a sneaky Irish kid named Sean Hornswoggle. The redhead would hit the ball and run directly to second base if he thought he could get away with it. We soon took to calling any cheating “hornswoggling.”

– Chef Paul