I recently read Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw: Excursions In The Great Weird North by Will Ferguson (click through to read my review), which is a collection of essays about various trips to towns and regions across Canada. My #readcookeat radar was on high alert, scanning the pages, looking for a mention of something decidedly delicious-sounding that I could recreate. Well, sadly, I didn't actually find much, but there was this mention :
p208 This cafe is on St George Street, and it's called The Copper Kettle or The Iron Griddle or The Brass Bucket. A very friendly place. With very friendly service. Our waitress is cornfed and all smiles, and she deals us our menus as though they are a pair of oversized playing cards. Though I don't know why she bothers with menus, because she has, in her cheerful way, already decided for us. "Try the hogslop," she says, beaming.
Ian and I exchange glances.
"You're telling us we should try the hogslop?"
"Oh yes, it's very good."
"Okay. Two hogslops."
Turns out hogslop is not a communal practical joke played by Dresdenians on hapless outsiders. Nor is it an actual slop à la hogs. No, hogslop - a Dresden speciality, it seems - is a churned mix of potatoes, bacon, ham and onions. It has the texture and aroma of, well, hogslop. But it tastes mighty fine (potato, bacon, ham, onions : how can you go wrong?), even if the effect that follows it is not unlike how one might feel after consuming a half-sack of wet cement.
Well, despite the reference to a sack of cement, this actually really appealed to me, as a kid-friendly globecooking recipe. I decided to go looking on google for inspiration, and I did find two recipes that initially sounded promising - Hog Slop Casserole and Pig Slop. However, on closer inspection, they were actually nothing like the original meal. Hmmmm. Not one to give up, I managed to find an archived copy of the menu card for the Burns Restaurant in Dresden online, which has this mention on it : "Two scrambled eggs mixed with our hog slop mixture of diced ham, bacon, onions, Italian sausage and diced potatoes, then hollandaise sauce and shredded cheddar." Well, that sounded like a bit of a meat overdose, so I went back to the original recipe from the book, using just bacon, onions and potatoes. It was very tasty, with a fried egg on the side.
Hogslop
ingredients :
2 packets of bacon lardons
1 large onion
4 medium potatoes
Peel and chop the onion and put it in a large frying pan with the bacon lardons. Fry over a gentle heat for 10 minutes or so until the onion is soft and the lardons have taken on some colour.
This would be a great recipe for using up leftover baked potatoes (or roast potatoes or mashed potatoes - whatever you've got) but I microwaved mine for 15-20 minutes, until they were cooked all the way through. After removing them from the oven, I put them on a plate one at a time and crushed them with a masher. I still left them in quite large pieces though, but this is down to personal taste.
Add the mashed potato the pan and cook for a further 10 minutes, for everything to heat through. The potatoes will soak up all of the fat from the bacon, but you could always add extra butter, if necessary. I had a quick taste and it was salty enough, but feel free to add extra, if you want.
I decided to serve a mound of hogslop with a fried egg, which was a stroke of genius, as it saved the hogslop from being too dry. This would be great for breakfast or brunch, as well as lunch or dinner.
Linking up with the #readcookeat challenge over at Chez Maximka.
*** Don't miss my globecooking recipe index ! More recipes from Canada here ***
Adding to the #KitchenClearout linky as a great way of using up leftover baked potatoes.
Adding to the #KitchenClearout linky as a great way of using up leftover baked potatoes.
