Happy Hannuka [updated again!]

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Festival of Lights*


Festival of Food

*Yes, I know that the lamp on the right is not a proper Hannuka lamp. We were out of the proper candles, and the candles that we had fit only these two lamps.

UPDATE: Potato pancake recipe. Grate potatoes. Squeeze out as much liquid as possible. Chop onions and mix with grated potatoes. Add egg, salt and pepper. Form into thin patties and fry in 1/4″ of oil (traditional method) or in nonstick pan using a trace of oil, making sure to smash pancakes onto frying pan to make them as thin as possible. Drain, cool and serve with yogurt/sour cream and/or apple sauce or other fruit sauces/preserves.

UPDATE 2: I tried it again on the second night, this time using a mix:


Better the first time?

30 thoughts on “Happy Hannuka [updated again!]”

  12. I was gonna say the lamp and potatoes are called “menorah” and “latkes,” respectively. Instead, I’ll just start singing…

    Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh —

    CHANNUKAH, OH CHANNUKAH, COME LIGHT THE MENORAH..

  14. -I ate it with yogurt and cranberry sauce. Apple sauce would have been better.

    -The photo represents one batch. I made about five batches. A flat pan would have worked better.

  19. I was at a Waffle House in Port Arthur Texas earlier this year, late at night, after a very frustrating attempt to persuade a guy to testify for me in a case I was working on. The homey, blue collar ambience of the place, as well as the cheap and ample and yummy breakfast chow, helped take the bitter edge off the day.

  20. Well, now I’m going to hijack the thread and owe Jonathan an adult beverage (or maybe a WH special of his choice) at some future date … when I lived in Irving (TX; couple of miles W of Texas Stadium) in the ’90s I occasionally ate at the WH at TX-183 & O’Connor. Was in there one day with a very typical-looking WH crowd, who to be polite appeared to be of humble origins, modest attainment, and even more modest education. Some guy says something loud enough for several other people to hear about some modfication he’s making to his PC and everybody in the place jumps in and starts talking about patching DLLs and network protocols and God knows what — tons of highly technical, under-the-hood type details, the sort of conversation you’d expect to overhear at a convention of system administrators. It would have made a blue-stater’s head explode. Like going to a trailer park and finding it inhabited by cosmologists (Dilbert’s garbageman).

  24. Dan, it’s custom rather than rule, so there’s variation by family and ethnicity. I grew up eating potato pancakes a couple of nights out of the eight. During the past few years I have been making them two or three times myself. That seems like enough. In some Jewish traditions they eat deep-fried pastries and maybe other foods instead of latkes. I might try making the pastries some day but they are a lot more work (yeast dough) as compared to potato pancakes.

    Yes, the greasier ones taste better, but they are greasier. Tradeoffs.

  26. Good recipe. No quantities given, which makes it easily scalable. Still the potato onion ration would be good to have in some general way. I think a relatively small proportion of onions would be best, and I speak as someone who usually goes deep into the onion territory.

  27. I used one medium onion and about 4 medium potatoes. It would have been better with more onions. I don’t think you can overdo onions with this recipe.

    Remember, however, that I’m the guy who wants a “Hooked on onions not drugs” bumper sticker for my car.

  29. When I make them at home, I usually use about two pounds of potatoes and an onion about the size of a baseball. Since I’m cooking for fewer this year, it will be a pound of potatoes and half the onion.

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