Homemade Latkes

For this recipe we need potatoes and onions. We also need other stuff, but I’ll forget what those things are in the future. I’ve never even had latkes before. It’s her family’s recipe; she’s teaching it to me.

1. First, I start off by joking about how we should be making those bomb-ass stuffed cookies she learned to make from her grandma.

2. She actually starts off by telling me we have to peel potatoes. This recipe serves four — her, her mom, her brother, and me — so there’s a lot to peel. Her mom and brother are out for the afternoon so it’s up to us to tackle it all. It’s really insane amount of potatoes.

3. We peel a few potatoes and then make use of a mechanical shredder. One by one we place these potatoes into a receptacle and work a lever until we get what looks like potato confetti.

4. I ask about making those cookies again.

5. This next step, she tells me, is the most important, and constitutes the special family secret for making perfect latkes. She rinses a handful of shredded potato in water and tightly squeezes it dry in paper towel. That’s how to get rid of the starch, she says, but it requires a strong grip. I take that as a cue to step up to the plate and offer my non-existent muscles for this task.

6. She cuts up onions. I continue to squeeze the starchy confetti, super paranoid that I’m not squeezing hard enough and am ruining her family recipe.

7. She takes the onions, squeezed potatoes, and whatever other ingredients I won’t remember — probably eggs or something — and mixes them together. I go back to peeling more potatoes, as we’ve barely made a dent in the ludicrously tall pile on the kitchen counter.

8. She spoons some of the mixture into a pan and begins to fry them. I make more potato confetti in the shredder to allow this production line to continue rolling. We’ll be up to our necks in latkes in no time!

9. I break the mechanical shredder.

10. We spend twenty minutes trying to fix the shredder. A chunk of potato has gotten lodged between the metal blades and the plastic casing. We try to force the lever down, but to no avail. We try take apart the shredder, but it won’t budge. We even try to prod the potato with a knife, but the sucker’s stuck.

11. We give up on making more latkes.

12. We set aside the few latkes we did make for her mom and brother to eat when they get home. They’re a little burnt and at this point they taste like defeat, although that flavour could be the starch I failed to squeeze out. Actually, either way, it’s still the taste of defeat.

13. We take a nap on her basement couch, latke-less.

14. We should have just made those dope, awesome cookies.