Corned Beef Cakes

Sierra Leonean Entree

CORNED BEEF CAKES

INGREDIENTS

1 pound potatoes or yams
1 teaspoon salt (1 teaspoon more later)
1 small onion
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon parsley
1 teaspoon pepper
1 12-ounce can corned beef
1 egg (1 more egg later)
3 tablespoons milk
1½ cups bread crumbs
1 egg
6 tablespoons peanut oil or vegetable oil (2 tablespoons per batch)

Makes 12 cakes. Takes 1 hour 10 minutes.

PREPARATION

Peel potatoes. Cut each potato into 4 pieces. Add potato pieces to large pot. Add 1 teaspoon salt and enough water to cover potato pieces. Bring water to boil using high heat. Boil for 15 minutes or until potato pieces are soft. While potato bits boil, dice onion. Remove pot from heat. Drain water. Mash potatoes with potato masher or fork. Add onion, 1 teaspoon salt, cayenne pepper, parsley, pepper, and corned beef. Mix with whisk until well blended.

Add 1 egg to small bowl. Beat with whisk or fork. Add milk. Mix with whisk until well blended. Add egg/milk mixture and corned beef/mashed potato mixture to large mixing bowl. Mix with hands until well blended. Make 12 patties.

Add bread crumbs to a 3rd bowl. Add 1 egg to a 4th bowl. Beat egg with whisk or fork. Add patty to bowl with egg. Coat both sides of patty with egg. Add egg-coated patty to bowl with bread crumbs. Dredge patty through bread crumbs until patty is completely covered. Repeat for remaining patties.

Add 2 tablespoons peanut oil to pan per batch. Heat oil using medium-high heat. Oil is hot enough when a breadcrumb added to the oil starts to dance. Carefully add 4 bread coated patties to the hot oil. Sauté patties for 1 minute using medium-high heat or until patties start to blacken on the bottom. Carefully flip patties over; they can be crumbly. Sauté for 1 minute more or until the new bottom side of the patties start to blacken. Remove patties from heat. Drain on paper towels. Repeat for remaining batches.

TIDBITS

1) The continents and other bits of land are constantly in motion.

2) Does this mean you’re going to get whiplash just by sitting in a chair watching TV in the den? Or will your television suddenly separate from the rest of the den and rapidly recede into the distance? And what about the giant chasm between you and the TV?

3) What if you are near sighted and suddenly your program “FriendsTM” is on a screen 100 yards away and you need to get your glasses and they are in your bedroom which is on the other side of a 100-yard-wide chasm and although you were a crackerjack long jumper in college and could leap 26 feet, you still know that your longest jump is still 274 feetshort of the width of the chasm and you are so distraught that you’ve just composed your longest run-on sentence ever?

4) What if you’re on the famous pier in Santa Monica and California’s entire coast falls separates from the rest of the continent and plunges into the ocean and you can’t help wondering if you had locked the front door or not?

5) What if you’re driving on a country road and all of a sudden the ground beneath you lurches forward so much so that you exceed the speed limit by 200 mph? A traffic cop pulls you over. You tell the officer, “The movement of the Earth’s crust made me go this fast”. The cop shakes his head. “Like I haven’t heard that one before.”

6) Well fret not, dear friend, the previous four tidbits are currently quite unlikely. The Earth’s plates currently move at a rate of about ¼” a year.

7) How long would it take for your television to move 100 feet away?

8) 400 years. The sitcom “Friends” would be over by then.

9) Let me further calm you down. Your TV and your chair are almost certainly on the same Earth plate. So now matter where your huge bit of the planet moves, you always be the same distance away from your show. You’ll not need to get your classes. Any 100-foot chasm. will be dozens of miles away.

10) So how do we know all this? How did the study of plate tectonics come about?

11) In 1946, Kadie Mansara of Makeni, Sierra Leone, served this entree, Corned Beef Cakes, for her little boy, Patrick. Now Patrick liked to play with his food. His three corned beef cakes were originally all next to each other. However, the little scamp moved the corned beef all over the plate until they were positioned as shown in the above photograph. Ma Kaide gazed at the new configuration

13) She had an epiphany. Great sections of the Earth must move in the same way. We don’t see the movement, but it happens. Slow continental movement would explain mountains, earthquakes, even why the west coast of Africa looks like the east coast of South America. Mrs. Mansaray would go on to found the prestigious Sierra Leone Plate Tectonics Institute. 40 years later she received a Nobel Prize for her ground-breaking research. Now you know.

– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.