Welcome to this week's post in the MFRW 52-week challenge. The topic is "Best Leftover Recipe."
With the holidays approaching and their corresponding dinner parties--and leftovers--this post should be easy. In reality I had trouble coming up with a recipee. I think the problem was the clarification of "leftover." So I decided to go with lokse, a potato tortilla from my Slovak heritage.
Traditionally, they were made with the end-of-the-season potatoes. In a way, they could be considered leftovers. The potatoes in the bottom of the bin had lost some of the moisture and were not appropriate for some other recipes. Lokse are also an appropriate recipe for this time of year as they are "fast-food" at holiday markets in Slovakia.
Lokse could also be made with left-over mashed potatoes (no cream, no butter, just smashing the potato enough so that there were no large chunks. As a result, the holidays weren't the only time we had lokse. Whenever Grammy B was coming to visit, we made sure to accidentally boil too many potatoes so we had a large bowl of "leftover" mashed potatoes awaiting her special touch. Grammy was the only one who had knew how much a pinch of salt was. Even more importantly, no matter how hard she tried to teach us we never mastered the art of rolling the potato pancakes to the proper thickness. If we got them thin, then we couldn't do the necessary flip into the cast-iron frying pan without them falling apart.
Illustrating how things can change, a few years ago, when I tried to find the recipe (before I found my mother's handwritten one,) I only found one site that actually had the instructions. When I did a little more research today I found a dozen. Mine can be found at an earlier post in the challenge.
~till next time, Helen
I went back and read the previous challenge for the recipe. It sounds delicious! So... How much fat (butter/oil) do you add to the cast iron pan? Or are your cast iron pans so well seasoned you don't need to add anything? Do you ever add sour cream to the inside? Thanks, Helen!
ReplyDeleteno butter or oil goes in the pan. The butter gets rubbed on the lokse after its cooked. The sprinkle of salt acts to keep it from sticking. As a family we never did the sour cream bit, but did have it once when we had a sales meeting at a kosher deli in Manhattan.
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