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 the turkey.
My favorite Christmas dish is Chocolate Candy Cane Bark. I could eat this stuff by the pound, so when I make it I have to give most of it away as gifts to the kid’s teachers and neighbours and such…now I’m really starting to crave it, wonder if it’s too soon to start Christmas baking? 😉
My favorite Christmas treat is sugar plums! I found a recipe that uses a ton of butter, powdered sugar, cocoa and golden raisins. They’re a pain, but yummy!
Christmas Eve, it’s seafood gumbo, soooo good and hot especially when it’s cold outside. On Christmas Day, it’s most definitely the Duck and Cornbread Dressing. My mom makes the absolute best!
For all the other times during the holiday season, it’s fudge, pralines and divinity. YUM
I’ve got two favorites: goose—if I can find one, and ammonia cookies. The ammonia cookies are an old German recipe, where you use baking ammonia as the leavening agent instead of baking powder. It keeps the cookies soft, and white like a sugar cookie. I’ll be making them with my daughter this year for the first time. I may need a maid to clean up when we’re done. 😀
My favorite hoilday food is my mom’s cornbread dressing. It is so good. My son loves it and wants me to make it for him. I told him that his grandma doesn’t write down recipes. She has no idea how much of this and that she puts into her dressing. She does all by taste. I don’t think I’ll ever be that good of a cook where I don’t need a recipe card in front of me!
I’m Spanish, so for me it’s turrón (what I believe you guys call nougat) all the way. Almonds + honey + egg whites? Yes please! Thanks to the Moorish occupation, we Spaniards love everything almond-y.
My favorite holiday treat is our traditional dinner of crab legs and shrimp, followed by seafood chowder the next day if there are any leftovers.
Pierogi! i make the best ones with cabbage and mushroom and bacon on top! mmmmmmm… now i’m hungry.
Caramel Sufganiyot are pretty awesome.
Ghirardelli’s Peppermint Bark is my fave seasonal treat—-and this year they’re making it with dark chocolate, so I’m in heaven:) Favorite baked goods are my aunt’s green (and I mean GREEN) mini-Christmas tree cookies—-mmm!
research23: guess I could take one for the team and try 23 different cookies as research for this contest;)
Pumpkin Pie. Made with heavy cream in place of the condensed milk. Oh, my gosh. It is so good.
OK it isn’t traditional Christmas food, but my Mom makes the best deviled eggs. As far as traditional goes, cookies, pies, dessert.
My family has a blended religious family; jewish and christian. For Hannukah really love potatoe latkes!! and for Xmas my ex-mother-in-law has a recipe for these russian tea cookies. They are like a small shorbread covered in powdered sugar. YUMMY!
Christmas Eve, my family traditionally eats pancakes and sausages for dinner. With that, we always have cottage cheese and apple butter. That night, my mother traditionally bakes a sour cream coffee cake (with a cinnamon sugar swirl through it) so that breakfast is taken care of for Christmas morning. We don’t have a standard food for Christmas dinner.
The rest of the holiday season, I swear by my mother’s rum/bourbon balls (she changes which she uses depending on mood) and candied grapefruit peel.
I can never get enough of my mom’s homemade sage stuffing recipe. The best thing is we don’t stuff the bird (at least i don’t) so I can make it with anything – be it ham, turkey or our christmas polish sausage. 🙂
Sufganiyot! Chanukah’s the one time of year when I can eat doughnuts and feel righteous.
I love this lime-pineapple-marshmallow salad that my mom makes for the holidays every year. It’s like a Jello cheesecake, and it’s sooo good. 😉
Soufganiyot!! I’m having a Hanukkah party tomorrow and am making soufganiyot filled w/my mom’s homemade blackberry jam made from the berries growing in her back yard. So very good.
Also, pumpkin pie.
My mother makes the mostamazing peanut butter cake. It’s a basic butter recipe cake with a cooked peanut butter frosting. That cake is absolutely fantastic. The only problem, she has no recipe for the frosting, she just knows how to do it. Even showing me how to do it, I cant figure it out. I make my own version, but it’s not the same.
I make a cranberry orange liqueur that starts marinating as soon as the cranberries appear for Thanksgiving. Any drink made with that liqueur is my favorite taste of the holidays.
I love that the recipe mentions Lactaid milk. Thanks!
We make almond spritz cookies and decorate them with all kinds of tacky sprinkles and food coloring. Can’t wait for them this year!
I love my Polish kapusta! Like saurkraut, but less bitter (at least the way I make it). The absolute secret is to slightly mush about half the peas you put in, and put the other half in regular. I learned that from my grandmother and when another family member who doesn’t know makes it, it is SO different!
My favorite holiday food is cookies! When I was younger, my mother and I used to make batches and batches of all different kinds of cookies. Then we’d take coffee cans we’d saved for a while (and cleaned, lol) and wrap the outside in wrapping paper. We’d fill each one with all kinds of cookies, and give them out to my teachers, the mailman, neighbors, etc. It was alot of fun and you got to share them with so many people. My favorite of these cookies is the peanutbutter kiss cookies – a peanut butter cookie with a Hershey’s kiss on top. Delicious!!
Pumpkin Ice Cream Pie.
Mashed Potatoes!
My grandmother used to make peanut butter balls covered in chocolate and coconut balls filled with a marashino cherry. They were definitely my favourite!
My family doesn’t do traditional Christmas foods- Christmas Eve consists of fried chicken and mostaccioli from a local restaurant. My favorite Christmas foods, then, are the appetizers and desserts, which everyone brings. Favorite appetizer- shrimp mousse, made with shrimp, onion, celery and I don’t know what else…it is a spread for crackers that I could eat all day. For dessert, my Aunt makes cookies of all kinds and heaps them on a platter. I like the peanut butter cookies with the hershey kiss and the chocolate covered peanut butter crackers. Of course, half my family likes those too, so it is a battle to find one and claim it before one of my 18 cousins does so!
My favorite make-it-only-at-Christmas food has no name. It’s peanut butter between two Ritz crackers dipped in chocolate. It’s incredible!!
One of my resolutions for 2010 was to try a new recipe a month and I am SO going to try that sweet potato latke recipe. YUM.
My favorite food tradition has to be pumpkin pie. I don’t care if I get the rest of the meal or not, but I MUST HAVE PIE.
Hands down, my mother’s stuffing. Bread, butter (LOTS of butter), sage, a little salt, pepper and onion. NOMS! So simple yet so yummy—even better as a leftover the day after.
Ooh, I can’t wait to try the recipe. Thanks!
My favorite holiday food is my grandma’s collard greens. My family does something a little different to their collards; I’ve just never found anything at all like it from any other Southern family or at any restaurant. They’re just absolutely amazing. Unfortunately, my grandma passed away about five years ago so I never managed to get the recipe (she was still young and it was unexpected), but in true Southern tradition, she always made a TON of it, so we’ve been eating bags out of the freezer for years now. I’m not even joking when I say we may still have collards around for my grandkids.
My dad’s mashed potatoes and turnips. He only makes it during Thanksgiving and Christmas, so that’s when we know the holidays are here.
Traditional for me is Applebutter. I make huge batches and then give it away for gifts. Makes the house smell very good – like apple pie.
Christmas is not a big thing in my family. We do all the celebrating at Thanksgiving when everyone can come. Turkey, stuffing, pies, fresh whipped cream with berries…yum!
Oh, one of my favorite Christmas foods is my mom’s annual crab dip. This is the only time of year she makes it!
One of our families favorite foods is “Shoo-fly” pie. I have a recipe that includes ginger, cloves, and cinnamon. Everyone loves it. It can be eaten as a breakfast treat or dessert. For the past several years, we have grilled lamb on Christmas day – i put in cloves of garlic and smother in Dijon mustard – yum.
Latkes, baby. It’s the latkes
It has to be the festive drink of the Snowball – I’ve had them since I was a kid and it’s just not Christmas without them imho. And of course there’s the stuffing yourself silly with everything sugary you can lay your hands on – that works too 🙂
Egg Nog! And Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Lattes! Do those count?