Hanukkah, oh Hanukkah, it’s time for day three of the Smart Bitches Hanukkah Festival!
Today’s prize is pretty awesome. But first, I’ve been asked for the Sweet Potato Latke recipe I mentioned yesterday. Ahoy, here it is, and the giveaway is below the fold. It’s a good thing to hold with one hand, while eating latkes with the other hand.
Sweet Potato Latkes
Makes about 24 latkes. Adapted from Taste of Home Magazine.
1/2 cup all purpose flour
2 tsp sugar (I used Splenda bc I’m out of sugar. Worked fine.)
2 heaping tsp curry powder (MORE SPICE BABY YEAH)
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp brown sugar
1 heaping tsp ground cumin
3/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (like hotter with slow burn as you take another bite? Add more.)
1/4 tsp pepper
scant 1/4 tsp dry mustard
scant 1/4 tsp cinnamon
2 eggs beaten (Kinky!)
1/2 cup milk or Lactaid or milkish product of your choice.
4 cups grated peeled sweet potatoes
oil for frying
Mix the dry ingredients (flour through mustard). Stir in eggs and milk until blended. Add sweet potatoes and fold with a spatula or your fingers to coat thoroughly. Keep scooping from the bottom of the bowl to make sure there is equal potato/goo distribution. The goo contains the flavor!
Heat oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. I used enough vegetable oil that it was probably between 1/3 and 1/2 inch deep in the skillet.
Drop heaping tablespoonfuls into oil. Let set for about 30 seconds, then press gently with the back of a spoon to flatten out. In my big honking skillet I could fry about 6 or 7 at a time.
Fry for 3-4 minutes per side until golden brown. Add more oil if you need it.
Drain on rack covered with paper towels. Try to avoid eating while they’re piping hot (ow. Good luck with that).
NOTES:
I tried making bigger than heaping-tablespoon size, and they were soggy in the middle, so keep to the smaller size for browned, crispy latkes with chewy centers. The batter will get soggy at the bottom so stir every now and again to mix the potatoes with the wet stuff. Remember: the goo contains the flavor!
We’re serving with honey mustard, chipotle mayo, drizzled honey and whatever else I think will taste good.
Happy Hanukkah!
And now: Ahoy! Contest the third!
On the Third Night of Hanukkah, Smart Bitches Gave to Me: A Generation Two Kindle, and a $25 gift certificate to Amazon!
Just leave a comment below, and tell me your favorite traditional holiday food (Christmas, Hanukkah, Solstice, Kwanzaa – Eid is over, but is there traditional food for Hijra? – and you’re entered to win. Comments close in 24 hours, but fear not, there’s another book – paper or digital – giveaway coming soon. Because Hanukkah lasts for eight crazy nights, and I have more latkes to eat. NOM.
Happy Hanukkah, and Happy Reading!
I love my mom’s homemade fudge! Also, part of our tradition is this super yummy breakfast @casserole Christmas morning…yum…
Christmas cake: moist, dark brown, rich with eggs and butter, loaded with the tastes and textures of fruit, nuts, cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg, and breathing a subtle, heady breath of rum or brandy.
I know lots of Americans don’t like fruit cake; all I can say is, they just can’t have tasted a good one. Christmas pudding is almost as good (basically the same ingredients, but steamed and eaten hot with a sauce rather than baked and eaten cold), but the pudding forms the final part of the traditional Christmas dinner, so one is often too stuffed to appreciate the flavour fully!
My favorite Christmas food is rice pudding with almonds and cherry sauce!
It’s my aunt’s Danish tradition!
I learned all my food-prep skills from my dad: baking, cooking—pretty much everything. My mom isn’t great at cooking, But there’s ONE dish my mom makes every holiday season that blows everything my dad does out of the water: Rack of Lamb with garlic and rosemary. It’s my absolute favorite holiday season dish. Yum!
Every holiday and get-together, my grandma made the fruit salad, the corn pudding, and the cheesy-baked spaghetti (like home-made mac-n-cheese, only with spaghetti instead of elbow macaroni). I realize that these aren’t necessarily “traditional” holiday foods, but they were always my favorite dishes on whatever buffet that we were having and I miss them now that she’s gone.
For actual “traditional” foods, I like turkey, with gravy.
It’s pretty traditional for a german Xmas (Weihnachten): roast goose stuffed with apples and bread. Served with red cabbage and dumplings.
Normally served with red vine galore, but without me, becuase this year I am pregnant ^^
My favourite food at Christmas is a potato, cheese and onion bake. Even though it’s always hot here, it’s still delicious!
I’m actually having an early Christmassy meal this weekend. I’m going to be stuck in hospital over Christmas, and decided that I didn’t want to miss out on my favourite seasonal foods – so I’m cooking a nice meal tomorrow for DH and me. I’ll make fruit mince tarts tomorrow (according to my mother’s secret recipe) for morning tea, then make a Christmas pudding and steam it during the afternoon, and for dinner we’ll have a simple roasted turkey leg roll, with roast veg, and the pudding and clotted cream for dessert. I’m hungry just thinking about. And since there is no way the hospital Christmas food will be anywhere near as good, at least I won’t miss out on the yummy stuff.
I love my dream bars. I only make them for Chrismas Eve
Potato and chestnut stuffing! Particularly when cooked in a goose, but I’ll take it any which way.
Pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving and my mom’s brisket fir Christmukkah!
My favorite holiday food is turkey with stuffing 🙂 My mom makes the most amazing stuffing with bacon bits, duck, nuts and lots of yummy goodness. Plus my dad makes sure to leave all the white meat for me so I love it!! 🙂
Turkey, hands down. There’s nothing better than leftover turkey gaining extra moisture in the fridge and warmed up for a sandwich with some cheese. And Stove Top on the side (I don’t like any other kind of stuffing; I’m weird that way)!
growing up, we would all gather at my grandparents’ house to open presents christmas morning, and my aunt always brought a breakfast casserole. scrambled eggs, potatoes, cheese, and sausage. it really hit the spot.
I actually love my fruit cake. It’s made with pecans, dates, and maraschino cherries—-mmmm….so good!
Cupcakes with the very sweet icing and rainbow sprinkles that’s probably not so healthy but oh so yummy~!
Okay, not exactly a holiday food, but does “holiday-colored sprinkles” count?
hmmm…my favorite traditional holiday food? probably my great-aunt Emma’s Fruit Bars—they’re super-rich and full of pecans and candied fruit (it’s supposed to be mixed candied fruits, but Mom and I usually use just candied cherries ‘cause they’re our favorite.)
Russian Tea Cakes, no question. My mom makes them every year and we all fight to eat as many as we can without bursting!
Thanks for all the giveaways!
At Christmas we have Christmas pudding (we usually insist on at least one trial run through the year too). We don’t buy fancy expensive ones just a nice simple one which we light with brandy before serving and then coat with white sauce (sweet white sauce that is, not savoury or brandy flavoured or anything else just simple white sauce). It’s the only time we have this sauce, my Mum makes it and every year we have to talk her into making a double barch.
My daughter doesn’t like the christmas pudding so she has home made tutti fruity ice cream and she has dollops of the sauce on thet too.
Every year I make a Buche de Noel. It started when I was 15 and volunteered to make one for my high school French class. My mom has insisted I make one every year for the past 18 years. (I guess that means she likes it!)
We always have garlic turkey at Christmas, but the tradition is to make the carcass and leftovers into matzoh ball soup, and that’s what I love best.
My three-year old tasted her first matzoh ball the day after Thanksgiving this year, and that’s what she wants for dinner every night—-not the soup, mind you, just the matzoh balls.
Grandpa Jacobs would be so proud . . .
I am a latke person myself. Although we do go to my Aunt’s house on Christmas day for bagels and accompanying schmear. Oh, and of course, the ubiquitous chinese food on Christmas Eve. (Chinese restos on Xmas eve are better than J-Date; never will you see so many Jews in one place not the high holy days).
My favourite Christmas dish (although it’s not really Christmas food but we always prepare it for Christmas) is French salad with some ham 🙂
My mom makes the best Red Velvet Cake ever. Of course, I know how to make it as well after watching all those years. But something about her cakes is soooo much better. Then she puts little red and green sprinkles at the top for a little festivity.
OOh, I could make a huge list of favourite Xmas foods, but since I have to choose only one, I’ll go for the all-time favourite. When I was a little girl, I was crazy about Pão-de-Ló (a soft yellow sponge-cake traditionally made for Christmas in Portugal) with cheese. I ate so much of it I constantly got tummy aches – but since you can’t find that blasted cake outside Christmas anywhere, I knew I had to stuff myself with it.
Since then, I’ve grown up and found out that the cake actually exists outside Christmas time (I believed truly it was impossible to bake it out of the Christmas time) and I’ve happily stuffed myself with it when I want, so my hoarding needs declined.
Ginger cookies! Not only are they delicious, but the whole house smells wonderful while they’re baking. Although sugar cookies are great, too.
My favorite dish for the holidays is my mother-in-law’s corn pudding. I finally got the recipe and can make it all year round. It’s so good!
It’s so hard to pick my favorite holiday food – Mom’s home cooking would be best, but she’s 1100 miles away!
I love peppermint bark. Even the bag I found at the dollar store was awesome, and I’m not usually a fan of cheap chocolate, but I just loooove the combination of creamy white chocolate with broken up peppermint bits.
please don’t hate me!!
I love fruitcake!
My favorite holiday food is a cookie from my Grandma’s recipe file that, as kids, we named Grandma O’Neill cookies. Really, it’s a brown sugar cookie (raisins and walnuts optional) that have an icing on top. Just one taste takes me back to my mom’s kitchen and easier days.
With my sweet tooth, it would have to be the Christmas cookies. I make several kinds, because everyone has a favorite. Mine are the frosted cut-out sugar cookies. Mmmmm.
Parsley stuffing for the bird, unless it’s goose, in which case chestnut.
Oh, and rum sauce with the Christmas pud, not brandy – give it a try.
miles68 – I’ll be going further than that to get home for Christmas.
English Christmas cake (dark fruit cake with marzipan and royal icing). Nothing like American fruit cake!
This is a tough one… My mom makes this amazing pumpkin roll that has a cream cheese filling. Not the easiest thing to make, but whenever I fly home for Christmas or Thanksgiving she has one waiting for me. Moms! It is so yummy.
How I miss my mom’s fruitcake. I know, I know, everyone thinks it’s just a door stop in disguise, but my mom would gather the best ingredients and bake up a storm—in September! She had several recipes and made cakes and loaves. My favorite was a dark fruitcake (with no nuts) made with grape juice (very expensive for us in the 1950s and she always let me drink what was left after the baking. When they were done, she’d wrap them carefully in cheesecloth to age, and twice a week until mid-December, would unwrap them to “give them a little drink.” I vividly recall my prima and proper mother up to her elbows in liquor! She’d get them out and give them as presents. I think most people that got them enjoyed them. Interestingly enough, the nuns that taught at our school always seemed ver appreciative. Maybe it was the liquor? Mother made them every year, sending me mine, until the early 1990s, when she began developing Alzheimers. She died in 1998. I have her dark fruit cake recipe but have never attempted it, knowing that it would never be the same.
My mom has always made this dish called Corn Casserole. I described it recently as “corn, and stuff that tastes like corn, and cheese.” It certainly doesn’t look like much, but it’s a perennial favorite, and we only get it on Christmas and Thanksgiving.
Totally not traditional, but my Jewish family always got together on Xmas to open gifts, etc. – and my favorite things served on that day were little spare ribs (sweet Chinese style, not Southern bbq style) and chopped liver (no, they were not served – or eaten – together).
I love warm apple cider and cinnamon cookies. I don’t know if it’s a Christmas thing or a cold weather thing, but I always crave them this time of year.
I love green bean casserole!!!