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Potato. Cheese. Onion. Heat.

I got it out of an old cookbook but the children said I'd already made it; just in a slightly different version.

In any case you don't need a recipe for a dish containing potato, cheese and onion. The three ingredients are fellow travellers and kind of just collide. In the presence of heat, they know what to do, and turn alchemy-like into that clichéd term, comfort food, which means something you don't quite make it to a chair to start eating.

The title was 'pan haggerty', but Wikipedia shows several different names for it. That proves the point: the recipe was never written down because it was so intuitively obvious.

Pan Haggerty.

Peel and cut two large potatoes into very thin slices. Do the same with two onions. Cook the onions in some oil in a pan until just softened.

Lay some of the sliced potatoes into the bottom of an oiled baking dish and caress them with melted butter. I use a paint brush (that has never been used to paint - I bought one for the purpose). Add a layer of softened onion and grated cheese - any cheese you like but probably not the stretchy ones. Repeat layering, add a layer of chopped bacon and finish with a thick layer of cheese.

Bake until cheese is golden. Set aside for a few minutes until the bubbling goodness has settled down from the roiling heat before you serve it. Scatter some parsley or Spring onions on top to serve.

*

Earlier that day, the forecast heavy rain had finally arrived in a three minute burst when I was stuck between the back of the shed and that of the property behind mine. I was in a three foot space bisected by the remains of a picket fence which had collapsed and sagged forward, throwing pickets. That made an unreachable pyramidal space where the escaped guinea pig was hiding. So I had to strip and raise pickets that carried rusted nails past my body and head and onto the roof of the shed. This, as the storm raged. Water off the raked roofs of both sheds bucketed into the gap. The wet guinea pig forged on, but became stuck in the intersection of two fallen beams. I scissored down and my hand just made him, and I scissored up again and somehow rose vertically and climbed the end-fence abutting my shed and placed the squeaking animal back into the two-storey cage from which he had escaped earlier.

Comments

  1. I love that you saved the guinea pig. I'm sure he was grateful... I mean, after the fact.

    ReplyDelete

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