One potato, two potato: Annalena is back, with two dishes involving our favorite vegetable: POTATOES

Ciao, ragazzi!  Annalena makes no apologies for her absence.  She's getting old.  It was the holiday season.  And she's busy.  Not just with cooking, but with so many other things.  She's decided to add French, or at least a little of it, to her  language repertoire, and her resolutions, well, let's not get into those.

So, to ease us all back , she's giving us two potato recipes.  Both easy, both delicious.  We need that, don't we?  And who does not like potatoes?      This is a recipe that she got from her CSA, and she calls out the wonderful folks at Rustic Roots, who helped by, well, providing the ingredients.

There are constant arguments about what constitutes "hash," as a dish.  If you feel this isn't hash, you can call it whatever you want.  Just make sure you make it, and eat it.  It's delicious.

Here's a picture of the ingredients:

Doesn't look like much, huh?  Indeed, what we have are a pound of potatoes (these are the blue ones, with their skins on), a chopped yellow onion, 3/4 teaspoon each of hot pepper and fennel seeds,  and 2 tablespoons of soy sauce.  What you don't see, is the olive oil.  Or the salt.  Here we go.

First, add two tablespoons of olive oil to a wide pan.  Annalena used a non stick, and she recommends that here, because this is a dish that does have a tendency to stick (potatoes and onions are loaded with sugars, ragazzi, and browning is the formation of caramel.  Figure it out).  When the oil heats up, add the potatoes and the fennel seeds.  Lower your heat, and cover the pan.  Uncover it every 4-5 minutes and stir the stuff up, and let it cook for 15 minutes.  This is what Annalena's pan looked like at the end of that 15 minutes: 

You can see the brown bits, can't you?  What you can't see is that the chopped potatoes are softening.  That comes about, in large pot, from covering the pan.  The potatoes give up water, it can't all get away, and the potatoes steam in it.  Meanwhile, the surface touching the hot oil, browns.

Isn't that neat?  We get steaming and frying, in one pan.  

So what do we do next?  Now, we add the onions, and the hot pepper.  If you are adverse to hot pepper, cut back , but please do not leave it out completely.  The 3/4 teaspoon does not sound like a lot, but if you have good quality hot pepper, it is.  

This is what you get, after about four minutes of cooking.  Again, this is done with the pan covered, and the heat at medium.  After four minutes, uncover the pan, stir the stuff, and cook for another 6 minutes or so.  

Here's what we've got after 7 minutes.  At this point, taste a potato bit.  You may want to add some salt.  In fact, Annalena is CERTAIN you will want to add salt.  But don't yet.    Because after you cook this mix for   ten minutes, you're going to add that soy sauce, stir it all together, and let it cook for another 3 minutes.   Soy sauce has a ton of salt in it, so you want to taste this at the end of the soy sauce cookery.  You probably WILL want to add salt anyway.  And this is what you have after about 30 minutes of cooking:

Everytime Annalena checked the potatoes, she pressed them down onto the pan, using a  spatula.  This gives more crispiness, and who does not like that? 

Most likely, this dish would work without the fennel, and without the hot pepper,  with no seasoning at all.  But potatoes, ragazzi, are one of nature's great sponges, or canvases, or whatever you like.  So let your imagination run free, and use other things.  Use other forms of potato.  Annalena thinks this would work with sweet potatoes too, and indeed, may very well work, with any of the root veggies.  So, create your own starchy veggie hash.  You won't regret it.  Indeed, after you've made it, Annalena thinks you'll probably wish you made more.