My wife, Mary Ann, has a unique style of cooking. She recognizes only two settings on a stove burner: Off and High. Her default cooking gambit is to put the pan of food on a burner on High, leave the room to do something else, and check back when she smells something burning.

That approach (which I do not recommend) happens to be the perfect technique for cooking hash brown potatoes. Hers are the best hash browns I have tasted, and she wows everybody else with them,