a good thing + a recipe

A movie and latkes and a bonus recipe too, from this odd little multi-faith substack!

Our cat, Shlomo. (Just kidding. His name is Snapper.)

The Good Thing

I know I’m the millionth person to recommend American Symphony. But if you’re just waiting for enough zeitgeisty energy to accrue around you before you watch it? Add mine to your atmosphere!

It’s a documentary about an extraordinary year in an extraordinary marriage. (Apparently I have to write this in the narration style of a Merchant Ivory trailer? But whyyyy?) Suleika Jaouad, the author of Between Two Kingdoms and the Isolation Journals here on Substack, is undergoing a second bone-marrow transplant for a leukemia recurrence and making art while her husband, the musician Jon Batiste, is being nominated for 8 grammies and writing a symphony and dealing with a mental-health crisis. Plus, it’s the pandemic. It’s beautiful and I cried a lot watching it. Also, I wondered a little bit, and a little bit guiltily, about some of the ways I spend my time and energy? Including how much time and energy I spend, say, complaining somewhat randomly? [shame grimace] Also, the Sloan-Kettering scenes were triggering for me, so if you are not feeling up to that kind of cancer-themed emotional riptide, maybe don’t watch this right now, and I am sending my love to you.

The music is fantastic, and I always love getting to watch artists create. (The Avett Brothers documentary and Get Back, about the Beatles making Let It Be, are two excellent examples of this wonderful genre—tell me others!) And their marriage feels very—hmmm—simultaneously deep and feather-light, if you know what I mean. It was just so good in all ways. A total palate-cleanser from holiday everything, if you need or want that.

The Recipe

Full disclosure: I have a love/hate relationship with latkes. The love part is eating them, naturally. But boy I can get so grumpy about making them! The way yes, the oil lasted 8 nights, The Miracle, okay, but also it somehow doesn’t even last long enough to fry one single batch of potato pancakes? And you have to keep adding more to the pan because so much of it ends up as a slick mist covering your face and hair and feeding oil directly into your adult-onset acne? Also the way you just stand there at the stove, frying latkes, while your whole life flies past, and then you’re an old woman and you sit down to eat and within half a second all the latkes are gone anyways even though you were certain you made lots. (See complaining above.)

Some years, I grump around enough about it that Michael ends up making them (uncomplainingly, sigh) and some years I buy the frozen hashbrowns patties from Trader Joe’s. No, not the actual frozen latkes that they do actually sell. The hashbrowns patties. I heat them in the oven and serve them latke-style with sour cream and apple sauce, and nobody complains. And some years I just suck it up and make latkes from scratch.

Excuse the word bacon! I treyfed up my Hanukkah post!

Have I sold you on my recipe? Ha ha ha! Sorry! We should do a Hanukkah remake of the Grinch, and it’s me. Hi. I’m the problem, it’s me. Will my heart grow three sizes before the final candle burns down? Nobody knows.

Latkes
Serves 4 as a meal or 8 as appetizers
Total time: 45 minutes

These are crispy and tender and salty and delicious. A pinch of baking soda keeps the potatoes from turning their creepy blue-grey color; whirring the batter in the blender makes it smooth enough to spread thin and cook through quickly; small pancakes maximize crisp edges.

3 fist-size baking potatoes or Yukon golds, peeled (enough to make around 3 cups grated)
1/2 a small onion
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1/4 cup flour (gf as necessary)
1/8 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon kosher salt (or half as much table salt) plus more
Vegetable oil (I like to use sunflower seed oil, but if I had a little schmaltz to melt in, boy would I)
Sour cream and applesauce for serving

Grate the potatoes and onion: I do this with the grating disk of my food processor, but it's fine to do it on the large holes of a hand-held grater. Stir in the eggs, flour, baking soda, and salt, then pulse the mixture briefly in the food processor, now fitted with the steel blade. If you didn't use the food processor to begin with, then your potatoes were probably more mushily grated (in a good way), and you can skip this step--or else whir the mixture briefly in a blender.

Pour enough oil into a large, non-stick frying pan to cover the bottom. Heat it over medium-high heat until a drop of batter sizzles on contact, then drop in heaping tablespoons of the batter and flatten them a bit with the back of the spoon. Fry the latkes until they're nicely browned, then flip them and fry another 2 minutes until the undersides are browned too. Drain them on a paper-towel-covered wire rack and, if absolutely necessary, keep them warm (sans paper towel) in a 250 oven until they're all fried. But I sometimes prefer to just to take turns frying and eat them while they're fresh and hot.

Repeat with the remaining batter, adding oil to the pan and allowing it to heat up as necessary. Don’t cheat the oil. You’ll feel like you’re using too much? But that’s the way to make them good and light; if you try to use less, the pancakes will cook unevenly and seem greasy. (The Hanukkah Irony inside the Hanukkah Miracle!) Sprinkle with salt, and serve with sour cream and applesauce.

Bonus Applesauce Recipe

I make applesauce two different ways: if I'm lazy, I just chop up the apples, cores, skins and all, and cook them until they’re tender, then put them through a food mill to fish out the skins and seeds and make a smooth sauce; if I peel and core them first, then I leave the sauce chunky.

Apples (let’s say 6)
Water
Maple Syrup (let’s say 3 tablespoons)

Chop the apples and add them to a medium-sized pot with a splash of water. Simmer them on low heat, covered, stirring occasionally, until they are tender (from 15-30 minutes), then stir in maple syrup to taste, and put the sauce through a food mill (or don't).

Happy Hanukkah!

Peace on earth.

xo