“Remoted” Day 271 (Saturday)

This week involved quality time with the stove and moderate levels of improvisation and winging it. There was a potato latke experiment on Thursday night, which was less about Hanukkah and more about having seen latke recipes everywhere I looked for the week leading up to Hanukkah. It’s been decades since I had latkes – all the way back to the last century and the first ex-husband who is Jewish. His parents came to America from Poland, and his mother was an amazing cook. I wish I’d had the chance to learn her recipes from her, but she lived in the Bronx and we didn’t see each other often. Even when we were there, the galley kitchen in her Co-Op City apartment made it next to impossible to have more than one cook in there at a time. 

Latkes, applesauce and coffee
 for breakfast.

One intriguing recipe that surfaced is a dessert sweet potato latke dipped in chocolate, but a non-dessert version was chosen instead. A recipe that involves baking instead of frying in batches became the winner. There were only two small white potatoes and two small sweet potatoes, so the latkes ended up being a mix of both potatoes with onion, bushed with oil and baked. They weren’t super crispy but they were really good.

Since the Thursday supper of latkes with apple sauce there have been latkes for brunch with sour cream and weekend breakfast latkes with applesauce and there are still a couple more left to go.

Somewhere along the way, rugelach made with refrigerated pie crust bubbled up to consciousness. This is a time saver, but lacks the cream cheese in most of the rugelach crust recipes. I love rugelach, but any time I see it for sale anywhere it feels too expensive or maybe I am just too frugal. Ex-husband number one used to call me “the Frugal Finn,” and he would also tell people he waited to get married until he “found a woman with a good credit rating and health insurance benefits.” The people he told included two levels of bosses and all my colleagues at the company Christmas party the first time he met any of them. He said it so often that after a few years it felt like there was more truth than joke to the comment. Gee, I wonder why we aren’t still together….

Once the burnt filling/sugar is
removed, they taste good.

Saturday morning laptop time was a recipe search and a plan. A pre-made pie crust was unfurled and spread with orange marmalade and ground almonds because they were both in the cabinet. The instructions said to spread it thin. As I rolled the dough with the filling, the marmalade oozed out. If it said “a shmear” instead of “thin” and I might have gotten it better. While in the oven, even more marmalade oozed out and burnt sugar surrounded each piece. Thank goodness for parchment paper or it would have been baked solid to the cookie sheet. After breaking off the burnt jelly sugar, the remaining cookies were really good. So good that, two hours after coming out of the oven there were only three pieces left. A rainy Saturday spent streaming shows and eating too many pieces of fresh rugelach is a pretty good day.