Jalapeño Cheddar Hashbrowns

The 1st picture in the series "Getting kicked out of the store
for posing the food."

A friend of mine recently tried to convince me that the tater tots they call hashbrowns at Dunkin Donuts to try and trick you out of your hard-earned money, are actually legit. She went on about how there are different types of hashbrowns, and how it's just a style that I hadn't seen before. Except I had seen them before. Because they were tater tots. No amount of rebranding will make them anything other than tater tots. Which isn't to say that they were bad, but they definitely weren't hashbrowns. Sure, this may seem like a pointless anecdote that doesn't really have anything to do with how to make delicious cheesy jalapeño hashbrowns.

Ingredients:

4 Potatoes (White potatoes have a pretty thin skin, so you don't really need to worry about peeling them, and they hold up well when grated. Or you could use whatever random potatoes you have lying around and end up with garbage food. Whatevs.)
2 Jalapeño Peppers
1 small Onion
6 oz. shredded Cheddar Cheese
1 Egg
1 tsp Salt
1/4 tsp Black Pepper
Vegetable Oil
1 sacrifice of chunks of your soul and body, torn asunder by pernicious circumstance

The first thing you're gonna need to do, is to come to grips with the fact that life is hard, and that pain is a regular and natural part of it that can't fully be controlled. Then, with a heavy heart, grab a box grater to grate up some vegetables and probably at least one major limb. Rinse off your potatoes, and grate them into a bowl until your arm gets angry at you and tries to make you regret ever having an arm. Once you're finished, lull your dumb arm into a false sense of security by taking a break from the grating. Use this time to rinse your jalapeños, remove their cores and seeds, mince them into itty bitty jalapeño bits, and add them in with the potatoes. Then peel your onion, chop it in half, and get back to grating until your arm starts shopping at Hot Topic and wearing gloomy makeup. Here's a fun fact! Onions release an irritant into the air that causes burning and tear production in your eyes. So while you're grating your onions on your potentially homicidal grater, you're gonna have impaired vision. Have fun!

Pictured: 1 plate of delicious hashbrowns, 1 plate of delicious
nonsense, decorative jalapeño and potato.

Using your remaining limbs, and whatever blood is still pumping through them, add in your cheese, salt, pepper, and egg, and stir to combine. Wrap the whole mess in cheesecloth or paper towels, and squeeze it to remove as much moisture as you can. Coat a pan with some oil, and heat it over medium heat. If, like my anecdotal friend, you believe that hashbrowns should be potato patties (which seem suspiciously like latkes), form some patties and get to frying. About 5 minutes on each side. But do yourself a favor, and at least make them larger, so you have something to actually bite into. If, like me, you believe in justice, and freedom, and in hashbrowns that are a pile of fried potato shreds and junk loosely held together by the common belief that life can be delicious, just throw a pan-full of your mix into your oily pan, and get to frying. Stir every minute or so until the whole thing starts to get crispy, brown and awesome. Either way, you're gonna be eating some delicious awesomeness. And one way you'll be eating hashbrowns too!

Fry Bread

From these humble beginnings, food was haphazardly made

Fry bread, at least in North America, was invented by the Navajo in the mid 19th century. They made it from the flour and whatnot that the US government gave them when it forced them to relocate far away from their traditional homes. Which is sad, and relevant, and touching. And is at least 10% of why I love this dish. The other 90% being a roughly even split of it being food I can drunkenly make at 3 AM, and random spite against traditional bourgeoisie bread, lording its fluffiness over the rest of us.

Ingredients:

2 cups All Purpose Flour
1 cup Hot Water
An unspecified amount of Vegetable Oil
2 tsp Baking Powder
3/4 tsp Salt
1/2 tsp Ground Thyme

The first thing you're gonna need to do is get ready to use your hands. The Navajo made this on the go, and I'm betting they didn't have rolling pins, or other kitchen gadgetry. Technically they didn't have baking powder either, and they used wood ash to make a lighter cake. Since I didn't want the fire department coming to my place (Again), I replaced it with Baking Powder. Get over it. Take a large bowl, and mix together your Flour, Baking Powder, Salt, and Thyme. Now it's time to take your hands from wherever it is you left them, and coat them with some of your Vegetable Oil. Why? Because if you don't, the next step will leave you with a giant mass of dough stuck to your hand. Which, unless you're planning on frying your hand, means you won't be able to eat it. So now that you're greased up, take your hot water, which you've heated in one of the traditional Navajo methods of microwaving, heating up on a cooktop, or turning on the tap marked H on your sink. Whatever method of water heating you chose, add it in slowly. You may not end up using all of it. The idea is for the dough to just barely come together into a cohesive lump of goodness. Cover this mix with a towel, and let it rise for about 30 minutes. If, like me, your baking powder is so old that you're relying on chicanery to see if it's still good, your dough may not rise all that much, but whatever you get will be worth the wait.

They're so good that you barely miss the wood ash at all

Once your dough has rested up for the big game, fill pan with about an inch of oil, and heat it up over medium heat. If you're using a fry/candy thermometer, you want to get it to the 350 degree area. Also, you're an embarrassment to the spirit of this dish, with your fancy superfluous kitchen gadgetry which I've totally never used, or recommended the use of on this very blog. Take your dough and tear off a small chunk. Roll it into a ball, and then start stretching it out into a disc. This sounds like a lot of esoteric nonsense, but just think of it like a little pizza, and you'll be fine. Probably. Take your dough disc and lay it into your oil. Fry it for about 4 minutes on each side, until it's golden delicious and super awesome. Drain it on a plate loaded up with authentic Navajo paper towels (I'm not an authority, but I think using inauthentic paper towels makes you racist), and that's it! Delicious food, made from almost nothing. I made it, and I'm still not 100% sure how that happened. And these things are super versatile. You can go all traditional, and top them with honey, or you can throw some herb butter on there, or you can even go crazy and add ground beef, cheese, and lettuce to make what they call Navajo Tacos. Or you can just finish them off with some salt and eat them plain. Which I may-or-may not have done to this entire batch despite grand plans for tacos.

Fried Matzah (Matzah Brei)

It feels nice to be back in civilization, where I can get
Vidalia onions. When do I have to go back to LA again?

Passover. It's a magical time of year when Jews celebrate having been redeemed from bondage (not the fun kind), by severely limiting what they can do or eat for a week. Matzah abounds, as do jokes about how terrible and/or constipation-inducing matzah is. But matzah doesn't have to be so sad and nauseating. With a little bit of work and a whole lot of butter, we can make these flat tasteless crackers into something awesome. Hopefully.

Ingredients:

12 standard sheets of Matzah

4 whole Eggs

1/2 of an Onion

3.5 TBSP Butter

1 tsp and one human pinch of Salt

1/4 tsp Black Pepper

The first step is to be either Jewish enough, or curious enough, for this awesome recipe to be relevant for you. Once you take care of that, it's time to crush some matzah. And when I say "crush," I mean "take it in your hands, place it over a colander, and squeeze until it (the matzah) is in smallish bits, and you have a deep feeling of satisfaction. Like you're a mighty hunter who just brought down a stag, and not some schlub caressing his matzah.

The next step is to beat your eggs until they lose all hope that this time will be different and you've changed. Once you see the joy for life go out of their little egg eyes, add in a teaspoon of the Salt and all of the Pepper, and stir to combine. Take half a tablespoon of Butter, and melt it over medium-high heat. Dice your onion and add it in to your hot butter. Add in an average human's pinch of salt, and sauté for about 6 minutes, until the onion starts to brown. Turn the heat off, and add your buttery onions in with your matzah. Combine with the salty peppery eggs, and mush it all into a kind of gross matzah glop.

Heat 1.5 tablespoons of your butter over medium-high heat in a 10-inch skillet. Or in a differently sized skillet, because maybe you either don't have a 10-inch one, or you're needlessly rebellious and like having an awkward number of batches for your fried matzah. Add in half of your glop, and press it down into a thick pancake. You should hear a nice sizzle when you do this. If you don't hear it, either your butter is too cool, you're suffering from Passover Deafness which is totally a thing I didn't just make up, or you put your glop in the wrong pan. Get your crap together, and make it happen. Let it cook on one side for about 5 minutes, until is gets crispy, brown, and awesome.

Not pictured: the hangover that this is curing

Now comes the flipping, which is more complicated than it seems. You've got a giant, dense, partially cooked glob of matzah gunk. You can try to just flip it like a pancake. Especially if you like ugly broken foodstuffs and grease burns. Or you can give up on being one of the cool kids, cut it into 4 sad surrender-bits, and flip each of them individually while weeping over your lost self-respect. I'm partial to sliding the entire thing out of the pan and on to a plate, and the flipping that plate over on to the pan. Ideally without breaking the plate and getting plate shards in your food, but you win some and you lose some. Regardless of the relative sadness or awesomeness of your flipping method, cook it another 5-ish minutes, until your b-side is equally awesome, crispy, and brown. Repeat the whole process with the rest of your butter and glop, and enjoy! For 8 days! 8. Long. Days.