The other morning, I was home alone: my wife and son were visiting her mother, and I had class, so I couldn’t go along. Tired of cereal, I decided to make eggs and potatoes, and came up with this idea for making a “hash brown nest.” Really, I just didn’t want to wash two pans, but then the idea was intriguing and I liked the name I came up with.
I’ve finally figured out how to make pretty decent home-style hash browns by cutting the potato in thin strips, rather than grating it. Grated russet potatoes always fall apart and make mush, not hash browns, and I don’t like rinsing them and then drying to try to keep that from happening. It never worked as well as I wanted, and created too much mess. But a slightly thicker, cut potato fries up nicely. I think slicing the potato keeps the fibres more intact than grating it does.
I fried the potatoes in oil for a bit until they were nearly done, made an open space in the center to create a nest (keeping it mostly free of potato, though it’s fine if a few pieces remain), then cracked two eggs into that open space, added salt and pepper, covered them so they would baste a bit, and in a couple of minutes I had my breakfast. A little hot sauce is good on top, and next time, I might melt a little grated cheddar cheese on top at the end. Tasty, easy, and not hard to clean up, this is a great dish for one person, though you might need multiple pans for multiple people to keep the nest shape going. Or on a large griddle, you could probably just shape the hash browns into nests with space between.
Kendall Dunkelberg 