Potatoes with Chorizo and Bacon (Patatas con chorizo y bacon)

This is kind of a cheat post.... I haven't actually made this recipe yet. My sister R cooked a really lovely birthday dinner for the Robber when he visited Roch in January, using recipes from the cookbook that we purchased for her for Christmas: 1080 Recipes by Simone and Ines Ortega. The cookbook is reportedly the "Bible" for Spanish cooking, the definitive collection both inside and outside of Spain. Along with the recipe below, she made us an orange flan and some lemon chicken, both were delicious! But this recipe, laden with fat as it is, was my favorite. I'm hoping to make it again, probably some time when the Robber comes or I have guests. Or I could see this being a delicious one-dish alternative to the traditional hash browns and bacon that we have every year for Christmas breakfast. Maybe I will remember and suggest to R that she make it this next year. The notations in parentheses are from R.

Ingredients:

4 T lard or 3 T butter (I used butter)
5 T oil
2 oz chorizo sausage, peeled, thinly sliced (I used chicken chorizo, which is somewhat unusual, and each sausage was 3 oz so I used 3 oz)

3 1/2 oz thickly sliced bacon, cut into half-inch wide strips
3 1/4 pound small potatoes, preferably new potatoes (I used about a pound-and-a-half each of red and white new potatoes)
1 T chopped parsley

1 clove garlic, finely chopped
salt
Directions:

1. Melt fats in a very large, thick skillet-- it needs to be big enough to fit all the potatoes in a single layer. Add meats and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, for a few minutes.

2. Add potatoes. Season with salt and cook over low heat, shaking the pan occasionally, for 45-60 minutes, until the potatoes are evenly browned. (The recipe says nothing about a lid, but at about 40 minutes I got nervous they wouldn't get done because of the uni-directional heat, and put a lid on them for the next 20 or so minutes. I think that they would have gotten done anyway, although I don't think the lid hurt, either. DO NOT put on a lid any earlier, though. Steamed potatoes get very mealy rather than creamy).

3. Just before serving, sprinkle with garlic and parsley and stir for a few minutes more. Serve.

Note from R: the book says some types of chorizo become hard with prolonged cooking. This wasn't a problem for me because I used chicken chorizo. But to prevent this, it says you can cook the chorizo with the bacon and set it aside. Sounds like a bother.

Cabbage With Bacon

Last Saturday we went to a seed farm in Geneva and harvested cabbages for a local food bank. This was an extraordinary effort which involved grabbing cabbages by the throat and decapitating them from their roots using hefty knives. Everyone cut at least one finger and most of us lost substantial skin on our knife hand. We harvested 18,000 lbs. of cabbages. Our reward: One huge cabbage. And when I say huge, I mean like 10-15 lbs. What a cabbage. I had no idea cabbage even existed of that caliber.

The first thing I did with it was hack half of it off and cook up some cabbage and bacon, an old favorite from home. This is how:

Fry up a package of bacon well-done and let it dry on some paper towels so it is left crisp and crumbly. Without removing the bacon grease from the pan, add a bunch of cabbage cut into long thin strips. Stir fry up the cabbage in the bacon grease, add some salt if you like. Then remove the cabbage from the pan, careful to not take too much grease with you, and then crumble the bacon into the cabbage. Keep cooking more cabbage until all of the grease is gone. Serve warm.

You can also refrigerate the leftovers and re-heat them, but the cabbage may be a little more limp the second time around. Delicious.