Hungry Sam - Hungry Sam

Latke's sizzling away...

Latkes. Delicious, greasy, fried potatoes smothered in sour cream and/or (definitely and) apple sauce. Runs contrary to the Hungry Sam healthy mentality, no? Well, yes, insofar as that mentality is absolute. It's not; treats are an important part of living a healthy lifestyle -- as long as they're infrequent indulgences and not an everyday thing.

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...

So, in order to inject some competition into all of this (of course), I picked up three sets of ingredients: a regular, non-organic set, an organic set, and a farm stand set. My challenge was to buy approximately the same quantities of each set of ingredients for about the same price. I did so -- at least in this case, buying ingredients from a variety of sources didn't need to impact the budget. For their part, three teams of students were to cook the best latkes possible, and our judges (the rabbis and high school program director) were to both select the best-tasting latke and try to guess the ingredients' source.

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.