The Unreal Meal

I’m assuming that most people out there know what latkes are, but just in case, I’ll give a brief history.  Latkes are a traditional Jewish potato pancake, though the traditions of how to make them, when, and why seem to be as varied as there are types of potatoes in the world.  Potatoes are actually a New World crop, so it doesn’t seem that the tradition goes back to, say, the ancient Hebrews.  Wikipedia tells me they’re mostly associated with Eastern European countries and common among Ashkenazi Jews, and really, I’ve no reason to doubt them.  I am personally not Jewish (Ashkenazi or otherwise), nor am I Eastern European, so I have no real traditions of my own.  I just happen to love potatoes (I am Irish, after all).

At any rate, on Sunday night I roasted a chicken, and with it we had mashed potatoes and parsnips.  I boiled the parsnips right with the potatoes and mashed them all together with a little butter and salt and a pinch of nutmeg (something I always put in my mashed potatoes because, well, I like it, and my mom does it with hers as did her mom before her, so that’s the way potatoes are done in the Unreal Meal household).

Of course, when I was getting read to cook them, I heard the dulcet tones of my boyfriend in the deep recesses of my mind crying “Never enough potatoes!  Never too many potatoes!” so I made the whole 5 lb. bag.  I’m here to tell you: there were, in fact, enough/too many potatoes.  As a result, I had a 1.5 quart container filled with leftover potato/parsnip mash.  I then decided that they’d be perfect for dinner last night made into potato pancakes and served with a pan-fried pork loin cutlet and some broccoli (also known as: these are the things I had handy in my fridge).

Now, I’ve eaten many a latke in my day.  I grew up with a lot more Jewish friends than you would probably imagine lived in Akron, OH; my family is all from NY/North Jersey; and I’ve lived in NYC for about five years now.  I’m not wanting for decent latke experiences, I promise.  That being said, I’ve never actually made the suckers before, so I was took a bit of a chance and decided to see what I could fashion from my leftovers.  Mind you, the only real risk would be that I’d have a kitchen filled with four disappointed eaters, so I guess it wasn’t that big a gamble, but still, I don’t like to do things poorly.

Fortunately for all four of us, they were really delicious!  I’m calling them Notkes, because I like silly wordplay like that, and because to be perfectly honest, I have absolutely no idea if they’re remotely cose to anything traditional.  I’m going to go out on a limb and say no, as parsnips probably aren’t part of every Jewish grandmother’s latke recipe.

Notkes

2 cups leftover mashed potatoes (or mashed potatoes and parsnips)
1/2 cup all-purpose flour mixed with
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 small onion, finely minced
2 cloves garlic, finely minced
1 egg, lightly beaten
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
some kind of oil/fat in which to fry them

Mix the potatoes in a medium bowl with the onions and garlic.  Add in the nutmeg and salt, making sure to distribute evenly.  Stir in the flour and baking powder (this, I found, is most easily done with your hands).  Stir in the lightly beaten egg.  Let the batter rest while you prepare your pan for frying.

Coat the bottom of a pan with the fat of your choice (see the note below).  If you’re using a non-stick pan, you’ll need less oil, and if you’re worried about fat or particularly health-conscious (as I am at the moment), that’s probably a better way to go.

When the oil is hot, scoop about 1/4 cup of batter into the pan for each cake, and press to distribute with the back of a spoon until it is round and flat.  Fry on one side, without flipping, until you see the bottom edges of the pancake start to turn golden brown (about two minutes).  Flip with a spatula and repeat on the other side.  Transfer to a plate to keep warm, and do this in batches.  2 cups of mash will make about 8 pancakes.

Some notes:

• On the oil: I used very little because we’re trying to be more healthful in our house.  I also didn’t particularly want grease-laden pancakes.  I made them in three batches.  The first was done with about 2 teaspoons of olive oil and 1/2 tablespoon of Smart Balance light butter (yes, the fake stuff, again, please don’t judge).  This combination was hands-down the best for getting a perfectly golden brown hue.The second batch I experimented with cooking spray.  Bad choice, steer clear of that one.  The third batch was only olive oil, and I think that in order to successfully do this with oil alone, there probably needs to be a lot more oil to get them to brown well.  Were I thinner and not focused on health at the moment, I’d probably have done them in all butter, and I suspect that would have been the most delicious.  One of my Jewish friends tells me, however, that there should be an “at least 200-1 oil to potato ratio,” so maybe that would really work best.  Another place where I fail to keep with tradition, I guess. ;)
• On the onion: I used a yellow onion because it’s what I had handy, but I think white might give better flavor.  White onions are a little stronger, and while mine had good flavor, I think they could have been a tinge onionier (yes, I just invented that word).
• On the potatoes: The cool thing here is that these could probably be made with any leftover mashed root vegetable.  I once made a mashed root veg accompaniment to a leg of lamb that was parsnips, rutabagas, turnips, and potatoes, and it was really stinkin’ delicious.  I bet that’d be awesome as a ‘cake.  Or sweet potatoes, and instead of the nutmeg (or maybe in addition to it), use cinnamon or allspice.  We even hypothesized what it’d be like to make a scallion mashed potato pancake, as sort of an East Asia meets Eastern Europe type fusion.  I also would have liked to include some fresh chives on top, but I had none handy.

In the end, like I said, they were delicious.  Of course, I still have about three cups of leftover mashed potatoes and parsnips.  I’ve put them in the freezer for another day when I think I’ll try my hand at a different Eastern European goodie: pierogi.

Freshly ground nutmeg is important because it smells/tastes better, and because it allows me to take cool pictures of the inside of the nutmeg seed!

Dinner is served!

Remember that ice cream you’d get as a kid in the square container that had perfect stripes of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry?  Wikipedia tells me that this Neopolitan ice cream was named in honor of its “presumed origins” in Naples, Italy.  I wonder if this stuff is still available today, and if so, has been renamed to reflect the often disingenuously PC culture in which we live?  Whatever the case, anytime that I think of combinations of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry, I instantly think of Neopolitan ice cream.

Speaking of things that are tenuously rooted in Italian food history, I’ve recently been having conversations about spaghetti and meatballs with some coworkers.  One particular coworker is somewhat fixated on Italian foodstuffs (I can’t say that I blame him).  For about a month leading up to Christmas he (mostly jokingly) insisted that he wanted one of four things for his Secret Santa gift:  a 55″ or greater LCD tv, an xBox 360, Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2, or spaghetti and meatballs.  No amount of lecturing on my part about how this is really an Italian-American dish and not authentic Italian cuisine would sway him.  In the end, two days before Christmas, we had our group gift exchange and his Secret Santa gave him a box of spaghetti and homemade tomato sauce and meatballs.  It was a huge hit.

After the new year, said coworker announced to us all that his birthday was at the end of January, and his list of gifts that he wanted remained largely unchanged.  This gave me an idea:  spaghetti & meatballs birthday cake.  A quick google search returned Ciao Chow Linda’s Spaghetti and Meatballs Cake.  I opted to do this for my friend, with just a couple changes:

• I used a boxed cake mix.  Please don’t judge — it had to be done in a hurry on a Thursday night, and because I’m not really a baker, sometimes my from-scratch cakes don’t turn out as well as I’d like them, whereas a box is really hard to muck up too much.
• I used the buttercream recipe from the side of the box of Domino’s confectioner’s sugar because it uses mildly less butter (I’m not sure that it’d really matter, mind you).
• I didn’t pipe my spaghetti with a piping bag.  Why, you ask?  Because I don’t own a piping bag.  In spite of the fact that I’ve posted cookies and marshmallows and other sweet treats here, baking isn’t really my niche, so I lack some of the more useful bits of baking equipment.  I tried using a plastic baggie with a hole cut in a corner (that’s how I drizzle chocolate on things as a general rule), but the buttercream was too thick and it kept springing leaks.  My solution was to use a potato ricer.  That worked better than I would have imagined.  If I were doing it again, though, I’d probably tape off half of the holes so that it doesn’t come out so thick.
• I used one jar of Smucker’s strawberry jelly and one of sugar-free strawberry preserves.  I would have used all normal strawberry preserves had the market near my apartment had them at all, but they didn’t.  I wanted preserves or jam so that there were chunks that looked like bits of tomato, but the sugar-free preserves have an unholy red/pink color to them.  As such, I mixed in the strawberry jelly which is really dark.  If I do it again, I’ll probably add a little red food coloring to try and mimic a more tomatoey color.
• The meatballs were outstanding, I thought.  The woman, Linda, from whom I lifted the recipe says that she’d change them the next time, but I thought they were really quite good: dense, chocolatey, and sweet.  The nuts in them really help give them texture to look like a real meatball.

This is definitely a fun project, not remotely hard, and easily done in advance (though I did it all in one sitting).  In the end, it took me about three hours, but that was hardly all active time, what with the baking and the cooling and everything.  I also made and ate dinner in the process.

The cake was a huge hit with the birthday boy, and everyone that had some loved it.  Of course, there are few things better than vanilla buttercream, strawberry jam, and chocolate “meatballs.”  Italian or no, it was delicious!

Spaghetti and Meatballs Cake