Where have I been you ask? Did I fly to a tiny Caribbean island again to rub it in? Did my book project or cute distraction eat me alive again? Not this time. In fact I climbed another (slightly smaller) culinary Mount Everest for you and came back with not one but two recipes.
| Channel | Publish Date | Thumbnail & View Count | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
 smitten kitchen | 2021-11-23 17:00:00 |  57,023 Views |
Potato Latkes | Smitten Kitchen with Deb Perelman
I’ve been wanting to make potato knish for almost as long as I’ve had this site. I thought I’d finally give it a try this winter when carbs-for-warmth are the order of the day but New York decided not to have a winter this year so it was either a 60 degree day or never. I’m glad I did because knish is quintessential New York brought to the slums of the Lower East Side by Jewish Eastern European immigrants who like most of our ancestors knew how to transform basic staples into belly-filling treats.
The first knishery opened a corner shop in 1910 (from 1890 to 1910 it was run out of a pushcart or you know the original taco truck) and as Milton Glaser and Jerome Snyder noted with delight in their 1968 book The Underground Gourmet "No New York politician has been elected in the past 50 years without at least one photograph of him on the Lower East Side with a knish in his face." That Yonah Schimmel knishery is still around (with its original freight elevator and never-shared recipes) and while I know the word knish means a lot of different things to a lot of people these days I'm going to go with their take: wrapped in dough filled with potatoes and fried. Or as the current owner told the New York Times on the occasion of the shop's 100th anniversary "I don't want to offend anyone but a knish is baked round and made of potato or mixed with potato. It's not square. It's not fried."
Well I’ll leave it at that for the most part. I did make a very classic potato knish with mashed Russet potatoes and caramelized onions. But I couldn’t leave it at that; I never can. I made a second batch with red potatoes cream cheese caramelized leeks and kale (kale!). If you’re still clutching your pearls over my red potato and leek sacrilege don’t because I came close to adding bacon to it and I think I showed remarkable restraint. (Though you don’t have to.)
