Week 40 - Screw Ups Revisited

The theme for Week 40 - screw ups revisited - made me laugh. I could think of a whole bunch of things that would qualify for the challenge out of the things I've made since I started my cooking adventure for real last year. There was the Cuban black bean soup, but I have zero desire to make that again (and I still feel like that sofrito was a waste of good tasty vegetables). There were those onion rings, but we already had a breading/dredging week to focus on that. There was a Chinese tofu dish that I pathetically attempted to shallow fry (and failed). But the one that made the most sense was bubble and squeak. I've tried making it twice (at least I think I did but have not yet found photographic evidence of the second attempt) and both times it was a total failure and ended up as just mashed potatoes with vegetables. This was a screw up I could certainly revisit.

A previous attempt at bubble and squeak - basically mashed potatoes with greens and a little browning

This was bubble and squeak's last chance. If it didn't work this time, I wasn't going to try it again (in this form). I had a few ideas for how to fix the recipe - use a nonstick pan (in the past, I used a regular stainless steel pan), butter instead of oil, use smaller chopped vegetables. But even with those tweaks, I wasn't really very confident in the success of this mission until I uncovered a crucial piece of information thanks to Jamie Oliver (here). In his recipe, you fry the potato mixture for half an hour before it turns golden and gets flipped. Perhaps that was the problem - that I just wasn't cooking the bubble and squeak for long enough! It was like a light bulb went on in my brain and I had a plan.

For this version of bubble and squeak, I used:

- about 2 lbs of russet potatoes ($2)

- 10 oz bag of shaved Brussels sprouts ($2.79)

- 2 green onions ($0.30)

- about 1 tbsp of dehydrated chopped onion ($0.10)

- salt and pepper to taste ($0.10)

- garlic powder to taste (generous amount) ($0.10)

- 2 tbsp butter (divided) ($0.50)

Ideally I would have gone with traditional British bangers but they don't carry those at Trader Joe's and I wasn't about to make my own sausages. We picked up a Costco-sized package of sweet Italian pork sausage over the weekend, so I made a batch of that (5 sausages for $3.50). An onion gravy sounded like a good match as well, but I didn't feel like making a gravy with all the other work I had to do, so I decided to instead just make some caramelized onions as a "gravy." All that took was one large onion ($0.75). I love caramelized onions. So versatile and relatively cheap! That put the total for dinner at $10.14, and for that amount, it was pretty filling.

The first thing to do when making this is to peel and roughly chop the potatoes, and then put them in a pot of boiling water for about 15 minutes until they are really tender. While the potatoes were cooking, I started browning the sausage in another pan (no oil, there's plenty of grease in the sausages themselves).

When the potatoes started getting softer, I added about 1 tbsp of butter to the nonstick pan, and then threw in the Brussels sprouts, chopped green onions, the dried onion, garlic powder, salt, and pepper, and sauteed it for a little bit. The plan had been to add the potatoes to the pan and mash them all together, but the pan was definitely too small to do that without making a huge mess and losing lots of potatoes/vegetables, so I had to adjust. I could feel disappointment creeping in, as if I were already screwing up bubble and squeak for the third time, but I tried to let it go.

Once the vegetables had cooked down a little bit, I drained the water out of the potatoes pot, added the vegetables plus more garlic powder and black pepper, and then stirred it around until it was all mixed up well. I didn't think the whole mixture would fit into the nonstick pan, so whatever didn't was just going to be mashed potatoes for us to snack on (I ate way too much of that before dinnertime). (As a side note, can I just say how much I love these shaved Brussels sprouts? We've tried them in a salad before, but they are excellent cooked, and I loved the flavor of this mixture before I added it to the potatoes.)

I added the other tbsp of butter to the nonstick pan (over medium heat) and then started spooning the potato mixture into the pan until it was fairly full. I used the back of the spoon to smooth it into an even layer, and then let it set. After about 15 minutes, I could see that the edges were turning brown, but I let it go another 5 minutes, just in case. The last thing I wanted was for it not to be golden all the way around.

I was pleasantly surprised after 20 minutes when I started moving the potato mixture around and the entire thing moved like an omelette in a pan. This was a welcome difference from all the previous times I made bubble and squeak not in a nonstick pan. All those times, I could scoop up the mashed potatoes and move them but the browned layer remained stuck to the pan and I had to scrape it off. Looked like the nonstick pan was the way to go.

I had to break up the browned layer on the bottom in order to flip it over, as I did not trust myself to flip the entire (heavy) potato mixture in one move. So I flipped it over in sections and flattened it back into an even layer and then let it set again. I let it go for about 10 minutes until the bottom looked browned again.

While all this was going on, the sausages got extremely brown (and I did rotate them but they got very brown anyway) and I decided to cut them into half-size pieces so they would be easier to eat and so I could make sure they cooked through.  Once I removed them to a plate, I put the onion slices into the same pan (no extra oil needed with all that pork sausage grease), sauteed them, and added a little bit of water once they started to stick. They didn't get as caramelized as I've done it before, but my plan was to just let them caramelize for as long as it took for the bubble and squeak to finish.

A couple hours after I started, our English (inspired?) dinner was finally complete. Sausage pieces, caramelized onions, and bubble and squeak. The bubble and squeak had finally worked, which left me feeling really satisfied. It's a lot of work and/or time, so I'm not sure how often I'll actually make this in the future. But since its purpose really is to serve as a vehicle to use up leftover vegetables and other stuff from the fridge, at least now I know if I need to do that, it'll actually work. (Thanks Jamie Oliver for connecting some of the dots on what I was doing wrong!)

We enjoyed the dinner. We are fans generally of sweet Italian sausage, caramelized onions, and mashed potatoes, so we were pretty much going to like it unless it was a complete failure. The onions definitely brought it all together, adding a sweetness that was missing from the other 2 components. They were especially good with the potatoes, which was the real focal point of the dish in my mind because of the challenge. Somehow, even with all the butter and seasonings, the potatoes weren't exceptionally flavorful (although they did taste like potato and the browned parts with butter were quite tasty), so they really needed the onions or some sort of gravy. A nice onion and sausage gravy would have been good, but I didn't really have time to do more than I did that night. I'm just so glad bubble and squeak finally worked!