Creative Recipes: Wild Goose Hash and a Food Writing Prompt
Food prices are on the rise here in the USA. So as not to be wasteful, I try to think of clever ways to use leftovers. In our refrigerator was a serving of grilled wild goose. I thought of hash. The world is looking topsy turvy to me, as my country continues to be sharply divided. I was in the mood to make some hash.
Hash is a mish mash of things, by definition the word either means chopped food or discussion of what is going on, ie. Let’s hash things out.
I try to greet strangers looking for what we have in common as opposed to what might keep us apart. The idea of combining a melage of leftovers to create a tasty meal is something many of us can relate to. Everyone enjoys good food. Sharing a meal brings people together.
The usual type of breakfast hash in the United States is corned beef hash. But why not use an alternate meat, particularly a meat with a decisive taste such as a game meat? And if you are a vegetarian, you could use mushrooms or carrots.
At any rate, the idea was simple. I gathered one peeled potato, ¼ onion and my sliced goose meat. I put those three items in the food processor with a pinch of fresh rosemary for a few minutes and voila-my hash was created.
In a large frying pan I heated olive oil until it sizzled and browned the hash. Then I slid the hash over on one side and fried a few eggs. Simple!
Breakfast was good until I started surveying the news. It is the 2lst century. We are living on a beautiful planet, but due to rising temperatures how much longer will earth be a hospitable place? Instead of working together and solving problems, some of our leaders our encouraging us to point the blame on someone else.
It’s challenging to take the responsibility, but we are the stewards of the earth. The food we eat is a gift. How it is prepared and how it is offered is part of the cooking process.
In closing I would like to share an excellent nonfiction essay by Francesca Cannan titled “Lessons from the Apple of the Earth”, published last summer in Inquisitive Eater Magazine.
WRITING PROMPT: Think of a vegetable, fish, or meat you are grateful for. Describe why it tastes so good. Include texture, smell and appearance in addition to taste. What memories does it elicit? Try writing a series of memories associated with the food you are grateful for and dig a little deeper to write about how these memories may be related. Try the same exercise using fiction. Where does that ripe plum or tender monkfish take you in story? Have fun and if you might be serving grandmother’s pretzel dumplings with gravy to friends and family, consider s ubmitting to the Holiday issue of Instant Noodles Literary Magazine. The theme for that issue is Gravy.
Thank you for reading. f you enjoyed this post and want to support my writing, consider purchasing my little chapbook filled with short essays and poems.
Thanks again.
Published by Nadja Maril
Nadja Maril’s prose and poetry has been published in literary magazines that include Change Seven, Lunch Ticket, Thin Air, and The Compressed Journal of Creative Arts.. She is the author of Recipes From My Garden, a chapbook published by Old Scratch Press that includes both poetry and creative nonfiction prose. Author of two children’s books illustrated with paintings by her father Herman Maril, as well as Who IS Santa? for which she did her own illustrations, Nadja is also the author of two reference books on antique American Lighting, published by Schiffer. A former journalist and magazine editor, Nadja has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Stonecoast Program at the University of Southern Maine. To read more of her work and follow her weekly blog posts, visit Nadjamaril.com https://nadjamaril.com/ View more posts
Originally published at http://nadjamaril.com on April 8, 2025.
