Daily Archives: April 24, 2016
Toddlin’ Along . . .
Our morning started out way too early this morning, since we have a 290 mile trip today, instead of our usual 120.
But we couldn’t start our trip without our usual Cracker Barrel breakfast. We just had to get there earlier. We both got our usual, mine being the Sunrise Sampler, with two eggs, a sampling of bacon, patty sausage, and ham, grits, fried apples, and hash browns.
And this leads to my question of the day.
What happened to hash browns, and when did they change?
When I was growing up in Alabama in the 50’s and 60’s, we would often stop at a Toddle House when we traveled. If you’ve seen a Waffle House, you know what a Toddle House looked like. In fact Waffle House was indirectly spun off Toddle House, when a TH regional manager left to start his own chain of restaurants.
And like Waffle House today, you could watch the cook prepare your food behind the counter. And they made Hash Browns by squirting a little oil in a hot skittet, dumping in a serving of diced potatoes and frying them up. The cook would sprinkle a little paparika on them, and as they cooked on one side, he would flip the whole loose mass up in the air, catching them back in the pan just as it ended up back on the stove burner. And although the cook never seem to lose any potatoes, some of the oil would splash out into the burner flame and flare up with a big sizzle.
By ‘diced’ potatoes, I mean potatoes cut up into roughly 1/2” cubes, and not the shredded ‘riced’ potatoes we get now. In fact if you Google ‘Riced potato hash browns’, they will show you recipes for making the hash browns you get at most restaurants today.
And just to clarify, I’m also not taking about Cottage Fries. Those are usually much larger, and not really cubes, but have rounded edges.
But this is what the hash browns of my youth looked like.
Maybe it’s a regional thing. Nick’s Miss Terry said that to her, hash browns have always been the shredded ones.
So, you out in the audience, what’s your kind of hash browns?
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Since I got on a hash brown rant and it’s late and I’m tired, I’ll flesh out the rest of today’s journey in tomorrow’s blog and skip right to the good stuff.
As in a really, really good spaghetti dinner, serviced up by long-time friend’s Lynn and Dave Cross. They’re parked two spaces over from us, and Lynn told us a couple of days ago she’d have dinner ready for us when we got here.
And boy, did she. Lynn really knows her way around a spaghetti recipe.
Thanks, Lynn and Dave for the great welcome.
Thought for the Day:
Fun Facts about Toddle House.
- It was started in the early 30’s by James Smith, father of Fred Smith. Fred went on to start his own company in 1971. It’s called FedEx.
- During the segegation era, the comany had a parallel chain for African-Americans called Harlem House.
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