savory

Root Vegetable Pancakes (Which Are Kinda Latkes & Kinda Not)

~ mary_m ~ Leave a comment

Ah, November, when New England thoroughly enters the long, dark time of root vegetable season. We’ve still got Brussels Sprouts at the market, but we’re also seeing more & more radishes, beets, potatoes, parsnips, and turnips and less & less of anything else. (No one except me, in my family, will eat a beet. Parsnips are only slightly more popular.)

So… what’s a a nice person who tries to eat local & seasonal (at least some of the time) to do? Enter the root vegetable pancake, aka these-are-not-really-latkes. They’re tasty! They can count as an entree for Meatless Mondays! Best of all, you can slather them with apple sauce and sour cream.

Basic formula:

~2 lbs shredded root vegetables, such as potatoes, turnips, parsnips, or even beets if you’re not in my house. I generally include some onion, maybe one small onion for every two lbs. of total veg. People who don’t like turnips will be happier if you use at least 1 lb potato and save the weird stuff for the other 1 lb.

1 egg

1/4 cup flour

salt and pepper

chopped herbs if you feel like it

oil for frying

Basic method:

Shred the veggies, then place them in a flour sack dishtowel or piece of cheesecloth and sprinkle with some salt (~1 tsp). Let sit for a minute or two, then squeeze out any possible liquid by twisting the veg. in the towel over the sink or a bowl. Squeeze hard.

Mix the now drier veg. with the egg and flour. Add pepper and chopped herbs to taste.

Fry (in ~1/4 cup rounds) in olive oil (or bacon fat if you’re really not going to call them latkes) over medium heat until both sides are medium brown and crisp. Keep warm in a low oven while frying the rest.

Serve with sour cream and apple sauce. Celebrate that you actually remembered to use your turnips.

For much more thorough directions of almost exactly this same thing, check out Food52’s How to Make Latkes Without a Recipe.

Add Another Thing

~ mary_m ~ Leave a comment

Once upon a time, in a life before kids, I took a short series of cooking classes with John Ash. He’s a nice guy, with a much pickier palate than mine.

I’ve retained three things from those classes, though I only practice two of them:

  • If you blanch your basil for pesto, it will stay green rather than oxidizing. (I never bother.)
  • You can tame raw garlic (for pesto or salad dressing or …) by blanching it in boiling water for about a minute. (This one I do bother with. Tossing individual cloves in a small sauté pan in water to cover is quick and easy and does make a difference.)
  • If a dish doesn’t taste quite right, add a taste element that isn’t yet represented: sweet, salty, bitter, spicy, sour, umami.

That last one, while possibly obvious, is a trick which has saved me from a boring dish countless times. Today, it was squash soup. A simple base of sautéed onions, squash, chicken stock, a middle-eastern spice blend from a friend. This was good! But… it needed something. It had sweet, umami, and a bit of spice. I added some sherry (round and nutty, yet still counts as sour) and it was much better.

Then, of course, my 7 year old refused to even try it (though he did have several servings of salad).

I <3 Food Writing (More than Recipes)

~ mary_m ~ 1 Comment

I own a full bookcase worth of cookbooks. It is only one bookcase because every time (OK, sometimes a year after every time) it goes over, I do an emotionally traumatic cull and let something go. I love my cookbooks.

I don’t cook much out of books, though. I read them, often cover to cover when I first get them, and then I keep them around for inspiration. If I’m attempting something new or complicated (or old and beloved but not set in stone), I’ll pull out a few different books to read their variations on the theme. I’m generally too non-compliant to follow any recipe word for word. (Unless its chemistry dictates that as the only wise choice, and sometimes, to my chagrin, not even then.)

I sometimes forget that my non-compliance runs deep when I discover new (to me) online food writing. I love reading food blogs as much as I love cookbooks. When I fall in love with a writer, I’ll often try their recipes word for word. And then, after the first few, I relearn the lesson. I’m just not wired that way.

Today, it was the Food Lab’s Ultra-Gooey Stovetop Mac and Cheese. This is an awesome article, full of both science and cheese. I wanted to love the recipe, too. More than that, I hoped to convince my kids to love it, especially the one who refuses to eat “good” mac and cheese, but loves the box kind. This one has real cheese! No dice, though. Too gooey. I suppose I should have guessed from the name and I definitely should have guessed from the cheese to pasta ratio, but I wanted to believe! Next time, I’ll use twice as much pasta. (You may love it as written! I know people who do! Maybe we’re just weird anti-goo people. Sure is a lot of cheese to pasta though.)