Hanukā Party

[dorchadas]

Last night I had a Chanukkah party! And that meant I did a lot of cooking.

Previous Chanukkah parties schoolpsychnerd did all the cooking, but obviously this year it was all down to me. A few weeks ago, I found this article about a Japanese-American woman who converted to Judaism and her attempts to mix both culinary cultures together. On her website, there's a recipe for mochi latkes, and as soon as I saw that I knew I had to try making them.

This was the first time I've ever fried anything in oil and I was pretty worried about screwing something up, starting a fire, getting oil everywhere, or otherwise causing a mess and ruining everything, but none of that happened! I put on an apron and had a little trouble with spattering oil, but otherwise I fried up the latkes and they tasted great. The addition of mochiko meant that they were chewier than standard latkes, with a more cake-like texture, and then a hard crunchy shell outside. I wish I had time to make the nashi topping from the recipe that went with them, but I barely had time to finish the food I did make, even though I shifted my work schedule and got home at 3:45. I just finished the last latkes right at 7:30 when fiendishfanfares arrived.

By contrast, the sufganiyot I made turned out less well. I'm not much of a baker and this is only the second time I've ever made anything with yeast--I made challah a decade ago just to see if I could make yeast bread and then once I did, I retired undefeated--so any number of things could have gone wrong. And something did, but not with the actual prep process. I made the dough, it rose, I cut it into pieces (using an onigiri mold because it was all I had) and they rose, and then I transferred them to the oil. I didn't realize that they only needed maybe 60 seconds of cook time, though, and probably two thirds of them were burned. I also didn't have time to put the jam inside them, even though I bought a cake decorator set just for it, so I served them with jam on the side.

I figured I had enough food when I was done:

...I was wrong, though. On the one hand, that's good, because people liked my cooking enough that they ate all of it! On the other hand, I hosted a party and ran out of food, and smtemp ended up ordering mozzarella sticks from a pizza place to provide more. What I should have done is made more latkes when I was testing out the process on Wednesday--I made one batch and froze the remainder, and then heated them up in the oven to prep them for the party. If I had made two or three batches, then I would have had enough food. Some late-comers didn't get anything to eat!

Well, now I know for next time! It was a lovely party, the first I've hosted here by myself, and other than the amount of food it all went off pretty well. I even got a Kirby-themed card from emojimjitsu and johanna.jones.127! And now the apartment is clean again and I'm headed out to go to Call of Cthulhu and then more parties. It's shaping up to be a lovely weekend.