In which the universe demands latkes

I'm having a party next week to celebrate the December Solstice, and I'm a little stressed out about it. I'm a bit of a recluse, especially lately, but I would like my friends to meet my new love interest. And I like parties OK.

Normally the food I serve at a party is the least of my worries. I'm a pretty good cook, and I used to do it for a living, so cooking for a crowd is not that big a deal. But I'm out of practice. I don't want any last-minute failures or surprises, so I've been testing recipes, even the easy ones. Well, maybe not the sour cream-plus-french-onion-soup-mix dip recipe; that one's pretty much idiot-proof, as long as you mix it up ahead of time so that the soup mix dissolves properly in the sour cream. And make a lot. I don't know why everyone loves that stuff, but they do.

So I was cruising through the fridge to see what I had on hand and found, rather bizarrely, that I have nearly ten pounds of potatoes. Why? I don't know. I live alone. I must have purchased them. OK. Potatoes. Potato salad? Nah, I don't really like potato salad all that much, and there's always so much left over. Yuck. Latkes? No way. Total pain in the ass. Huge mess, smell of frying all over the house, and I'll be standing in the kitchen all night instead of actually enjoying my guests. Or, more to the point, instead of wandering about fretting about all the other details and making sure everyone has enough to drink and the dog doesn't eat the misteltoe and stuff.

So I'm thinking that there's this appetizer at this one restaurant I go to occasionally that's sort of similar to latkes only it's just grated potatoes, made into a loose, lacy (yes, fried) croquette-type thing topped with sour cream & caviar. Sort of like a latke, but simpler. And you could grate the potatoes in a food processor instead of by hand. Could I make these in the oven? Are they any good if they're sort of cold from sitting around on the table waiting for people to pick one up? Could I make them ahead of time and heat them up at the last minute?

No, no, and no. Cooked in the oven they totally fell apart; it was like a pile of teeny tiny french fries. Fried on the stove and left to cool off a while they tasted like those canned shoestring potatoes. Reheating them did not help; it made them taste like warmed-up canned shoestring potatoes, and all the sour cream in the world wouldn't have helped.

OK, so I'll mix in a little bit of egg and milk, embed them in sort of a matrix to hold them together. Better, but they need a little something extra, so I grated an onion and that was a little better. Some salt & pepper helped too. And a few snipped chives. I'd given up on the oven idea by then, so I was frying them in a mixture of half butter and half mild-tasting olive oil. The egg & milk mixture was a little too runny, so I added some matzoh meal and let it stand for a while.

The result? Delicious. Perfect vehicle for sour cream and chopped kalamata olives. I didn't happen to have caviar on hand, but I think I might like olives better anyway. I let some stand until they were cool and they were still yummy and crisp around the edges. So far, so good. Worth the pain in the ass factor, in my opinion.

But can they be reheated? Julie, bless her heart, said that she would be willing to stand outside with an electric frying pan and fry them up during the party if they can't. But I'd like for her to enjoy the party too, so I put half of them in the freezer and half in the fridge, and then I called my mother, told her what I'd done, and asked did she think I could reheat them. She's a caterer, after all, and if something can be done ahead of time she'll know how to do it right.

"No," she said. And then, "Well, maybe." She suggested spreading them out on a cookie sheet and putting them in a warm oven (maybe 250°F or so) for a pretty long time, like 45 minutes, but turning the heat up briefly at the end. And flip them every ten minutes or so. And make sure that your oven is heating evenly and one end of the pan isn't getting overcooked or burnt. Turn the cookie sheet around a couple times just in case.

So I got up the next morning and did as she said, although I did it in the toaster oven rather than the big oven because there were only like nine of them and they were tiny, a little bigger than bite-sized. It worked! Although I did have to sort of blot a little of the excess oil off of them with a paper towel. And after work I tried it with the ones that I'd frozen. That worked even better! Except I left them in a little too long and failed to turn the baking sheet and while the crispyness factor improved, the ones on the end were a bit overdone. But they were still pretty yummy, even when they'd cooled off.

And I'd eaten the last of the olives and there was no sour cream, so I put a bit of yogurt and some horseradish on one, and that was really good. Also some chow-chow, which is good on pretty much everything.

I was talking last night to my sister the mailman while they were in the oven and asked for her opinion on reheating them and we got into a long discussion about the JoJo Potatoes from Ted Cook's 19th Hole Barbecue and how to reheat those, should you have any left over. A bout of homesickness for Minneapolis ensued, but then she that suggested a sheet of parchment on the cookie sheet might help with the oiliness, and/or to layer them with paper towels when putting them in the fridge. Both good ideas, and I'm going to test them tonight. Also, I'm going to try undercooking them slightly, to see if that helps. And I'm going to add some grated apples too, because there's a five-pound bag of apples in the fridge.

I said I wasn't going to make latkes, but you know what? These are really just plain old latkes. Happy Hanukkah, yall.