LEFFtovers: Pork Rib Hash

The key to hash is counterintuitive: don't futz much with the components. You'd imagine lots of chopping, scraping, combining, tossing, and flipping. But that just results in a granular mash, not a hash. For hash, do very little. In fact, touch it as little as you can. Also: always work from leftovers. This is meta-cooking, not cooking.

Here's what I did:

Roughly chop onion, drop in olive oil/salt/pepper and leave it alone until brown on bottom.

Once brown, flip and lightly mix in leftover latino deli pork rib meat that's been roughly torn off the bone with fingers (hands beat knives for hash). Reduce heat to low medium. Some rice and a couple of black beans were clinging to the ribs, and were happily thrown in.

Remove skins from leftover baked small Murasaki sweet potatoes (from Trader Joe's), smash flat with a palm in a plate, then transfer with spatula to smother onion/rib mixture.

I know it sounds really layery (and looks like that at first), but have faith.

Cook for a couple minutes, then flip 1/4 of the pan at a time, mostly to keep the bottom stuff from burning. As you do so, ingredients will unavoidably combine.

Once flipped, cook another minute or two (cusp burning is not only ok but optimal), transfer to plate (more unavoidable combining), simply piling it on. Don't get arty. Trust the process.

Serve with hot sauce alongside or squirted atop.

Note: no stirring happened at all. Just one flip of onions and one flip of all ingredients and that's it. So how did it hash up? If it seems like magic, just consider what would have happened if you were trying NOT TO.

Yup! Hash!

Another note: maybe 1 TBS oil, period. The meat's greasy enough. Sure, if I added a half stick of butter it'd have had that cheap straight-to-the-amygdala brain zonk quality (the gourmand's roofie), but I don't pull cheap tricks, I work for my deliciousness. Plus I try to eat healthy at home.

Room for improvement: in close-up photo, you can see that the meat hasn't browned into frizzy crunch. My timing still needs work. Maybe I should have added meat when I first started the onions (or even earlier, cooked low and slow for a while on dry nonstick). And maybe roughed up the meat a bit more with my fingers. More fat would get me there more easily, but, like I said, I work for my deliciousness.