Red Flannel Hash

Kids, before the days of the microwave (and I do remember those days), people had to be a bit creative about how food was reheated. Heck, even in the days of the microwave, if you are a cookie out in the woods working with the loggers, or a camper out in the wilderness for a few days, you certainly aren't going to be able to "nuke" your dinner from the night before, right? This is how hash was invented....take everything you cooked as individual parts the night before, and reheat them into something new and delicious.


Red flannel hash is one of the best examples of efficiency at its best. You need to start with a roast, or a boiled dinner, or any combination of a previous meal that was meat and veggies. I started with boiled corned beef and cabbage dinner.

This boiled dinner was corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, sweet potatoes, rutabega (yellow turnip), carrots, onions...I really did it up. Throw it in a pot with some pepper and boil it until it's done. So easy, so simple. I had so many veggies that I had to boil a pot of veggies alone in the corned beef broth after the first round was all done. And I ended up with a TON of veggies. Just the way I like them. Salty, meaty tasting veggies. This is not appealing to a vegetarian, but, hearty old-fashioned New England cooking rarely is. 

This two giant pot fulls of food would make leftovers for even a family of hungry loggers, and, let's face it, as whole chunks of meat and full-size vegetables, would be very difficult to reheat the next day. So chop it all up. Really chop it into bite-size pieces, then throw it in a cast iron skillet. Now, if I were an old-timey Maine logging camp cookie, I probably would have coated the skillet with bacon fat; however, I am not, so I used olive oil and butter. Here's where the "red flannel" comes in....after everything else is in, add a can of beets, drained.

Now, again, if I were properly equipped, I would use my beet can to cut up the hash even more as it heated through; however, I only used a small can of beets and therefore had to resort to using my biscuit cutter. I think any cookie would approve.

If you wanted to get all fancy-pants on this dish, now would be the time: herbs, garlic, salt to taste (I used corned beef, I needed no salt), more pepper, this would be the time to do it. But let everything sit in this pre-heated skillet for a while; the goal is to get that nice hash-happy caramelized crust on the bottom. Flip it, turn it, cook it until it is nice and soft and golden brown and hashy.

Hearty, flavorful, colorful, satisfying, all the things food should be. Try this with your next meat and potatoes leftovers and you might even forget what a microwave is.