Latkes and More

Happy Hanukkah!

We love to learn about other customs, cultures, and faiths. Plus, both my husband and myself celebrated Hanukkah with Jewish family members during our childhood holiday celebrations. So it was important to us that some of the Hanukkah traditions that we remember celebrating made it into our holiday traditions with our own children. 

Last year we bought the cutest little wooden dreidel game (please excuse my spelling I will try to catch any errors) and we were excited to bring it back out for our Hanukkah celebration this year.

We also included Hanukkah celebrations in our "travels" to both Israel and Russia in our Preschool Passport activities. DG learned about counting in both Yiddish and Hebrew, along with many words from the Hanukkah story and celebratory customs.

We read a very cute book which our Elf on the Shelf, Elphaba, brought the boys. I love how versatile our 25 Days of Books selections have been in the "classroom" in addition to our nightly reading. In this book, Bubba Brayna cooks heaps of latkes for a big old bear who she mistakenly thinks is the village Rabbi. 

Reading this fun story prompted us to want some latkes ourselves, and I happened to have some leftover mashed potatoes in the refrigerator to try out in some interesting latke recipes. 

Why mashed potatoes? Well, I lost the blade to my food processor (yikes) and I don't actually own a grater. So...mashed potatoes it was! I looked at some recipes and realized that turning mashed potatoes into potato pancake mix is a lot like making regular pancakes (genius - I know) so you'll see that the ingredients were fairly simple:

-about 3 cups of leftover mashed potatoes (mine already had milk and butter in them, it would probably work better without the milk and butter though)

-an egg or two 

-a few tbsp of flour

-salt and pepper to taste

-cooking oil of your choice (or butter! butter worked the best - the coconut oil failed miserably in this recipe unfortunately and I looove coconut oil) 

-sour cream and parsley to garnish

These are fairly simple to make and great for young kitchen helpers as long as the pan is on a back burner and far from your littles, because that hot oil is no joke!

First, warm your pan of oil. I suggest using butter, but EVOO worked decently too. I just think butter tastes delicious.

Mix up your ingredients, I just added one egg first and 2 tbsp of flour to start. Upon realizing it needed more of each, I added another egg and another tbsp of flour, and the batter had reached a good "pancake" or "waffle mix" type consistency which was ideal. Then you just fry them up in the pan as you would any pancake, though they do take a bit longer to get that golden crust on the outside. 

The first batch was a little bit too thick, but the batter made a great waffle in the belgian waffle iron!

Even without the perfect pancake shape, these still tasted delightful - almost like a wonderfully fluffy, slightly greasy potato knish. 

These also make beautiful "silver dollar" or mini-latke potato pancakes! It was a great way to repurpose some leftover mashed potatoes. 

Even my little guys were loving them with a side of sliced apples! 

And of course, when we had finished our latke lunch, there was time to play a few games of dreidel before nap time. DG won. He always wins, and I don't even let him win. I guess he's just "mazldik" - lucky! ;)