Thursday, December 6, 2007

Latkes

Our Atheist/Pagan/Gentile Chanukah festivities consisted of home-made latkes and reading a couple of Chanukah books.



I used the Featherlight Potato Latkes recipe from Sundays at Moosewood, substituting sweet potatoes for half of the potatoes (which made them delightfully golden and sweet).



The were imperfect, but delicious with yogurt and applesauce. Z dove right into them, M ate one without complaint and E ate the applesauce and yogurt. If all three of my kids had eaten them that would have been a miracle.


We don't own a Menorah, and if we did I wouldn't have lit it. E & Z are only familiar with candles in terms of birthday cakes, so when we had dinner at friends' a few weeks ago, and the friends lit a couple of candles on the table E&Z spent the whole meal trying to blow out the candles (two-year-old blowing incorporates a lot of spraying--something you don't want across the dinner table).

I have to confess that the sum total of my knowledge about the holiday comes from the Rugrats Chanukah special that we watched a couple of years ago (and which was surprisingly informative), but after trying to purchase only Maine-grown food this summer and running out of both olive and safflower oil in the same week, I can totally sympathize with the Maccabees. Believe it or not, not everything tastes good fried in butter (and when you're churning your own, you don't want to be wasting it on frying things).

Hopefully M got more out of the books than he did out of me. (M: What's Chanukah? Mom: It's the feast of lights.) And they won't grow up saying they'd never tasted a latke (or at least been given the opportunity).

2 comments:

  1. Making latkes on Sunday. I hope they turn out OK!

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  2. mmmm....i'll try sweet potatoes in mine next year.

    i made latkes, too - my first attempt. M did not compare them to his mother's - a verrry smart move, i think.

    ReplyDelete

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