[Sca-cooks] potato dishes for breakfast

[marilyn traber 011221]

> Breakfast potatoes:
> Nothing fancy, Stefan.  I was mostly concentrating on the lovely oatmeal.
> ;o) And the lovely butter.  The potatoes I remember most easily were 
> served in a crisp, square patty, like some sort of fish cake, or 
> maybe compressed hashbrowns, but that's not the texture they had.  
> That was un-chunky.  I suspect that the taters were finely shredded, 
> or perhaps even mashed, although that texture wasn't quite it, 
> either.  At any rate, they were very nice. 

Yeah, there are at least one or two ways to cook potatoes for breakfast ;-) 
Even here in the US, we have Home Fries (potatoes sliced, sometimes diced, 
and fried), which are often confused with Hash Browns (potatoes shredded and 
fried), and Potato Pancakes (mashed potatoes with egg, and sometimes rice 
added, made into patties and fried up rather like thick pancakes).. My 
stepfather, Paul, made a variation of Home Fries he learned in Germany, with 
the potatoes sliced thin and layered with onions, and allowed to gently fry 
until golden brown, although that was considered a lunch or supper dish. I 
make a breakfast for myself starting with sausage links browned enough to 
generate some grease, then onions gently fried in that grease, then all that 
moved to the side and eventually moved on top of sliced baked or nuked 
potatoes, and the whole thing lidded and allowed to cook until everything is 
hot and tender. Sometimes add sliced apples to the onion/sausage mix. 
Potatoes for breakfast aren't a novelty- in fact, it's a good way to get rid 
of leftovers.

> I had been given to understand (in one of those
> informal-but-makes-sense-even-if-it's-not-particularly-scholarly 
> ways) that one of the reasons for Lenten abstinence from dairy was 
> seasonal--milk animals needing to be more concerned about feeding 
> their young for a bit. 

Well, it's also necessity- the cows are dry until they give birth, then they 
produce colestrum for the calves which isn't good to drink- see below.

I'm actually not sure (and perhaps someone 
> else will know) what dairy men
> (then or now) did/do in the way of letting their pregnant cattle/sheep/goats
> dry up, and how long they're allowed to feed their babies before 
> said babies get weaned.....

Not entirely sure how they did it in the MA, but they probably worked on the 
natural cycle of the seasons, like sheep farmers do now, avoiding having 
babies to feed until the grass started coming in, in early spring. I know in 
Mc Connelsville, we avoided bothering our vets because of lambing from late 
February until early April- poor guy was likely to be called out at all hours 
for birthing problems. Sheep seem to have more complications than other 
species do.

At any rate, modern milk cattle are bred in series (in other words, in any 
given herd of milk cattle, 1/4 are fresh [milking], 1/2 are bred and milking, 
14 are pregnant and not milking), so that they produce milk all year around. 
Their gestation period is about 9 months. They have their calves, and the 
calves are removed from the mother as soon as they've gotten the colestrum 
(special secretion in the milk good for calves to develop their immunities, 
but not tasty for people to drink) and the calves are removed and fed 
seperately from bottles as soon as the cow comes into full milk. This HAS to 
be done, because otherwise cows are perfectly capable of with holding their 
milk from the machine, in order to save it for their calves, although a 
friend of mine had a Jersey cow (the one who taught me to milk) who would not 
only feed her calf, but adopt a couple more that she'd put to her, AND 
provide enough milk for my friend's family of 6 kids. And, the cows usually 
provide milk until the last 3 months of their new pregnancy. Variations among 
individuals, of course.

All this production requires a lot of feed, and modern machinery has allowed 
us to put up enough feed for pretty large herds- in period, putting up hay 
was pretty labor intensive, and thus done only to feed the animals you wanted 
to keep.

 I do know that late winter/early spring 
> was always the worst time for getting a decent number of eggs from 
> our hens.  Probably a combination of short daylight hours and cold,
>  signally internal changes in the chickens..... --Maire

Yeah, my girls have fairly recently started laying again. One has gone 
broody, so I'm hoping for some babies from her. Meantime, Margali has said we 
can get a straight run of babies, for meat and more hens, so I'm working on 
Step Two- making sure the babies are Black and White Giants. Am going to 
enjoy watching those annoying young cockerals getting out step ladders to try 
to breed the hens ;-) Black and White Giants are huge, often standing as tall 
as your waist, and dressing out to ~20 lbs- standard chickens are about up to 
your knee, and dress out to about 3-4 lbs.

Phlip