Potatoes and an Iron Pan #mfrwauthor

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

Be sure to see how the other authors answered the question. https://mfrw52week.blogspot.com/

Favorite Recipe, Heritage and Food #MFRWauthor

We're at week 45. Where has the year gone? Appropriate for this week, we're asked to share a favorite recipe for the holidays. I flipped through the recipe box and after I eliminated those from the Betty Crocker Cookbook I received as a wedding present several decades ago, I read through the handwritten recipe cards. Various recipes were considered and tossed aside and I settled on a heritage recipe. Lokse is a potato pancake from my Slavic coal-country ancestry. My grandmother cooked it on the top on a cast-iron stove, but adapted the recipe for a cast-iron frying pan. In the old country, Lokse can still be found at holiday festivals with different toppings. Although my favorite and the one most used by my family is just plain butter.

Lokse was also the focus of a post in the 2017 MFRW challenge. So instead of re-posting the recipe, I'll just include a link to the post, Lokse - A Heritage.


Now I'm hungry. Since it has been a while since I had some lokse, this would be a good time to schedule a cooking day with the next generation and start teaching them. Although she never met any of them, I'm sure my grandmother would approve passing on her recipe to her great-great-grand-daughters.


~till next time, Helen

A heritage -- Lokse #MFRWauthor

The 52-week challenge is winding down. It has been a wild run, with revelations into my writing life and insights into the world of other writers. This week's challenge is to share a favorite recipe. Various recipes were considered and tossed aside. Finally, to go with the end-of-year and end-of-challenge theme I settled with a heritage recipe. Lokse is a potato pancake from my Slavic coal-country ancestry that was traditionally cooked on a cast-iron stove. It can still be found at holiday festivals with different toppings, although my favorite and the one most used by my family is just plain butter.

The following instructions have been modified for modern cooking. Instead of cooking atop an old-fashioned, coal-fired, cast-iron stove, a good substitute is a cast-iron frying pan. (Note: these don't work well on a ceramic cooktop.) It is suggested to make small batches at a time unless you are like my Old World grandmother who could create the dough, roll it out to the right thickness (that of a tortilla) without using so much flour it got too soft, place the pancake into the flying pan without it falling to pieces, and spin and flip the pancakes using her fingers.

So here's an actual recipe.

• Boil potatoes until soft. 
• Coarsely mash and let cool. 
• Mix in 2 eggs and 1/2 cup flour. Add additional flour as needed until a soft dough forms. 
• Roll out by 1/4 cup balls on a floured board. 
• Sprinkle a pinch of salt in the bottom of an iron flying pan, and place the pancake in the pan. Prick with a fork.
• Brown on one side, spinning occasionally.
• Flip over and brown on other side.
• When done, rub with a stick of butter on both sides. Fold into a roll and eat. (For those more elegant circumstances, you can cut the roll into inch-long sections and eat with a fork.)

To avoid a rush, they can be wrapped in foil and kept warm in a toaster oven. That is if you can stop them from disappearing as soon as they come out of the frying pan.

Thanks for allowing me to share my heritage.

~till next time, Helen. And be sure to visit the other authors to see their favorite recipes.