Frying Potatoes, Sustainably
Latke's sizzling away... |
But this post isn't about treats, it's about diving, spoons and graters first, into latke making with my ninth grade religious school class last night.
But wait, you ask. What sort of awesome curriculum has room for latke cooking?
The sustainability sort! See, my fellow teachers and I have been teaching our students all about sustainability this semester, how choices can be made to promote a future and a world that can sustain our children and children's children.
The idea in doing a sustainable cooking program was this: Making the sustainable choice for all of our meals all of the time is hard. But making it SOMETIMES is easy, and doesn't necessarily impact flavor or price of the dish you're making.
Furthermore, cooking is a basic skill that facilitates making sustainable choices. When you're doing the cooking (as opposed to eating out or buying pre-made), you can control the ingredients, you know where they come from, how they've been prepared, what sort of carbon footprint they have, or at least you're more able to determine that information. (There are other good reasons to cook, outlined in Hungry Sam's new "Why Cook? A Guide" page.)
When you don't have a Cuisinart... |
I have to hand it to them, my guys threw themselves into this, grating, peeling, and frying their way to crispy goodness. Some of our students had solid cooking experience, others had little or none, but the energy was absolutely there -- which of course, as a food enthusiast, I appreciated. These young adults wanted those latkes, and the victory.
In the judging process, our three judges each tried the latkes with their toppings of choice. Only one judge correctly determined the source of the winning batch, the organic latkes, but the judge's decision underscored our very unscientific conclusion: if organic is at all a more sustainable choice, it doesn't need to mean a more expensive or less tasty latke.
A photograph of the winning latkes, one which CERTAINLY fails to do them justice:
The "recipe" we used:
-Some amount of potatoes, like 2 lbs.-ish
-Half an onion
-An eggs worth of egg whites
-Two pinches of flour
Mix, make little latke patties, squish 'em flat and dry, then fry.
Delicious.
Reader Comments (5)
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YUM! I call these potato pancakes because I'm not Jewish lol but mmm I love these things! That's SO AWESOME that you get to cook with the kids!
It was absurdly fun; I was totally in my element and the kids enjoyed it too. Kate, I would send some; I'm just not sure how well they'd keep in the mail...
The winning latkes did not have any flour in them!
They also had been washed an extra time, were smaller, and had good salt. :)
That was a fun class!
oh and btw, the picture of the grater was me!
Sarah, you are correct -- your team omitted the flour. And still won, despite the floor latke fiasco.