meatless mondays

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.

Talking About Cows with Kids

~ mary_m ~ Leave a comment

Recently we were on a lovely, Halloween candy detoxing, ramble through the local woods when the conversation turned to pollution and greenhouse gases. My eight-year-old chimed in with the sober, mostly accurate news that cows burp methane, a greenhouse gas, at alarming rates. Yep, they sure do, I agreed, though I don’t know if your numbers are exactly accurate and there are many factors to consider regarding meat.

I talked some about what I do, which is try to source our meat as carefully as possible, from farmers I feel are doing their best for their land and their animals, and to try to eat nose-to-tail, and then we talked about what more we could do. He suggested if we have salad with every meal we might eat less meat. I brought up meatless Mondays. The truth is neither of us (or anyone else in the household) wants to give up meat altogether. I’ve learned, through trying many different ways of eating, that eating meat makes my body and brain feel better than being vegetarian or vegan, despite knowing something about nutrition and how to prepare a good vegetarian diet. I also have a younger child who already limits what he’ll eat to relatively few things; eliminating chicken and ham would take out major protein sources, eliminating milk would be a huge nutritional blow. In the end, we didn’t come to any conclusions.

Honestly, I don’t know what to do about this question. I want my family to eat delicious, nurturing food. I want to live responsibly in the world. I’m a car driving American who is very fond of good steak, living in a place where it’s much much easier to make a good salad in July than it is in November. I have a kid who would gladly live solely on bread, butter, and milk if I let him and will rarely try something new. (I have another kid who is an adventurous eater, for which I am grateful, but I still have to feed both of them.) I think about this, a lot. I also, sometimes, just feed my family hotdogs and boxed mac and cheese.