Christmas and Chanukah Food Traditions
It doesn’t get better than this big pile of latkes I made this week for a late Chanukah celebration.
My family is big on traditions. With a Jewish mother and an Italian grandmother, we had big feasts for every holiday and it always had to be the same. Not that I am complaining because I looked forward to these holiday dinners every year. When I think about any given holiday, I can almost smell and taste the food.
When I think about Chanukah I think about dreidels, lighting the menorah and forgetting which direction to light it every year, chocolate coin candy that tastes like plastic and of course the latkes. I don't remember the latkes of my early childhood but I do know that my Italian, catholic Dad is the latke maker now. In case you have never had one, latkes are potato pancakes, typically fried and are made from very few ingredients- potato, onion, egg, flour or matzo meal and salt and pepper. My Dad has always hand grated the potatoes and the onion and only uses matzo meal, no flour. Smothered in apple sauce his latkes are delicious. Sorry folks, we are not a sour cream family.
When my kids were younger, I started making them in my house as we were not always with my family during Chanukah since the date changes every year and three trips to NY for holiday celebrations seemed like too much. I spent my first couple of Chanukahs blindly following my Dad’s way of hand grating and only using matzo meal because that is what I was taught. Then one day I grabbed my recipe box given to me at my bridal shower filled with recipes from each of the guests and pulled out the latke recipe from my good friend Jayme, written for me by her mother, Sara. This recipe called for flour and I decided to try it out along with using a food processor to grate my potato and onion. Game changer! The latkes are already a labor of love with all of that frying, but the hand grating just takes longer and can be painful if you accidentally knick a finger.
My latkes of late are actually a combination of my Dad’s and Sara’s recipe and I use a mix of both flour and matzo meal. I like that the flour really helps dry out the mixture and the matzo meal gives it some texture and also dries out the mix. I really prefer the food processor for the potatoes as they are a bit thicker which gives them a hash brown consistency and nice crispy edges…mmmmm! And if you want to see me make these in a quick video, click here.
Now onto Christmas. Christmas dinner is four courses. We start the meal the same way we do Thanksgiving with an anitpasto platter and bread. Next up is the highlight of our Christmas dinner, lasagna! Then we move onto the meat course which used to be roast beef when I was growing up but my mother stepped it up to beef tenderloin when she took over the hosting duties. And of course we end with dessert.
We covered the antipasto course in my last blog so let’s talk about the star of the meal, the lasagna. This lasagna was carefully assembled by my Grandma Anna when I was growing up. She made the meat sauce which consisted of meatballs, sausage and pork neck bones (don’t wince if you have not had them, they are delicious!). As my grandmother got older, she would still make the sauce but it was my job to assemble under her direction. She would stand next to me and give me instructions as I put the lasagna together, pointing at the spots that needed more cheese or more sauce. Those years of putting the lasagna together with my Grandma taught me everything I need to know to make the perfect lasagna. I have started to do the same thing with Annie and she made a lasagna for her soccer team last month. Guess who is going to be assembling the lasagna for Christmas dinner this year?!? I gladly pass the baton to start a new tradition!
Annie’s first time helping with the lasagna assembly in 2018 using my Grandmother’s original pan.
Funny story about the meat course that follows the lasagna. I may have mentioned that the sauce my Grandmother made had meatballs and sausage in it which get eaten with the lasagna so that kind of feels like a full meal in itself. Not in an Italian family, but I married an Irish/Scottish man and he was not used to this kind of food celebration. The first Christmas he spent with my family he was horrified to learn there was another course after he just filled up on the lasagna. And of course, since he was new to the family, he had to eat or it would be rude. Poor Dan, but he survived.
The meat course is accompanied by a green veggie and a salad to make the meal healthy. Over the past few years, my mother and I continue to say we don’t need the meat course, no one is hungry etc. But we can’t help ourselves so she gets a smaller tenderloin and we make a bigger salad. We have also taken to opening some presents before we sit down for course number three and finish the present opening before dessert. It’s all about the pacing with a meal like that.
Dessert has never been the highlight of our meals growing up so Christmas is usually Italian pastries or cookies, whatever someone else brings to dinner for dessert and ice cream.
I have bypassed Christmas Eve because I no longer spend it with my family since I got married almost 22 years ago, but my family shoots for the traditional Italian feast of the seven fishes and probably ends up with about three fishes. I really miss that meal, but you have to make sacrifices when you get married. No one in my house will eat all of that fish or shellfish so for Christmas Eve dinner I used to make salmon along with chicken just to represent but then we started ordering pizza and calzones. That’s Italian, right?
How do you celebrate? What is your favorite food from your December holiday? Send me an email to debbie@theeffortlessktichen.com I would love to hear.
Merry Christmas and Happy Chanukah and see you in the kitchen!
Debbie