Even though I’m back in San Francisco, land of chilly summer days and freezing summer nights, I still have a few things on my mind from the weeks I spent in northern Minnesota this summer.

First among these are potatoes au gratin. I became a bit obsessed with them this summer and I blame it all on the White Hawk (a.k.a. “The Hawk”). The Hawk is a restaurant and bar on the lake where is my family’s cabin. There is also a resort with a restaurant that no one on the lake really goes to anymore and a restaurant and bar that has been documented on these pages before, called the Lonesome Pine (a.k.a. “The Pine” – you see how we nickname things up north, hey?). The Hawk had closed, been sold, re-opened, closed again and then early this summer re-opened. Word on the lake was that the food was better than that at The Pine. We found that hard to believe at our house, but one night my mom and I took my son to find out.

Much like The Pine, the menu at The Hawk is Minnesota old-school. Ribs, chicken, walleye (although The Hawk throws in an option of Maine lobster – who orders that I do not know since fancy and expensive isn’t generally how the local crowd rolls). Dinners come with soup or salad and your choice of sides. One of the sides offered at The Hawk is “Awesome Auggies,” which, our very enthusiastic if slightly inept server explained were “the best potatoes au gratin ever – we pack them with cheese and some garlic and there’s pepper in there – they’re great.”

I’m no fool, I ordered the Awesome Auggies. Now I like a nice potato gratin Frenchie-style – either a dauphinoise with lots of gruyère and cream or an austere one with a few bits of ham with the potatoes and just a scattering of cheese shavings on top – but potatoes au gratin, creamy and full of cheddar cheese, leaves me weak in the knees. We never ever had them at home when I was growing up (probably, to her credit, because my mom didn’t buy Betty Crocker potatoes au gratin in a box like so many Minnesotan moms did), but I would sometimes get them at someone’s house or at a restaurant. To a kid who didn’t really much cotton to meat but found cheese irresistible, potatoes au gratin were the bomb, plain and simple. They were the ultimate side dish that I wished I could just order for dinner.

The enthusiastic server’s description of the Awesome Auggies got me pretty excited. A bit of garlic? Lots of pepper? Sign me up. I prepared myself for awesomeness. I started, in my crazy-pants fashion, thinking about ordering an extra side of them in case they were really as awesome as they sounded.

They were not awesome. They were salty. But they were not awesome. One of the ways in which they were not awesome was that they were not potatoes au gratin. They were the insides of twice-baked potatoes in a gratin dish. Sort of mashed, sort of chunky. Orange colored but it seemed to be more from paprika than from cheese.

The Awesome Auggies simply left me with an insatiable desire for good potatoes au gratin. As the addage goes, if you want something done right you need to do it yourself.

Potatoes au gratin

These are made with sliced potatoes – if you have a mandoline this is a good time to break it out, but a sharp knife and  a steady hand will do the job just as well. The real key is to slice the potatoes as evenly as possible, whether that be thickish or thinish.

4 pounds potatoes (Russets or Yukon Golds)
3 tablespoons butter, divided
2 tablespoons flour
1 1/2 cups whole milk
1/2 cup heavy cream
2 cloves garlic (optional)
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoon cayenne (optional)
2 cups shredded sharp cheddar cheese, divided

Preheat oven to 375. Peel potatoes, if you like, but you can simply give them a good scrub if you like to leave peels on. Slice potatoes into even slices. About 1/4-inch thick is good, but whatever thickness you can manage evenly is just dandy.

Use some of the butter to grease a 9×13 pan and set it aside.

Melt the rest of the butter in a medium saucepan over medium high heat. When the butter melts all the way and stops bubbling or foaming, whisk in the flour. Keep whisking and cooking until the mixture smells like pie crust (this signals that the flour is cooked), 2 to 3 minutes. Still cooking and whisking, slowly pour in about half the milk. Whisk until smooth then ad the remaining milk and cream and whisk until smooth.

Reduce heat to medium and cook, whisking, until sauce thickens slightly, about 2 minutes.

Stir in the garlic, pepper, and cayenne, as you like, and about a cup of the cheese. Whisk until cheese melts and sauce is smooth, about a minute.

Layer about half the potatoes in the pan and pour about half the sauce over them. Layer in the rest of the potatoes, pour the remaining sauce over them, and sprinkle the whole thing with the remaining cheese.

Cover with foil and bake for 45 minutes. Remove the foil and bake uncovered until bubbling and browning on top, about 25 minutes. Let sit for about 10 minutes before serving. Reheats beautifully. Freezes, like all potato-laden dishes, horribly.

A friend recently introduced me as a chef to another guest at her child’s birthday party.

Nope, I said. I’m not a chef.

Perhaps it was not very gracious of me to point out the mistake in that situation, but if I introduced someone as a computer programmer and they actually work as a “cast member” at Disneyland, I’d expect to be corrected.

I understand that to many people the label “chef” is one of respect – more a way to denote the (high!) quality of my cooking than to describe my job – but to me a chef cooks for strangers. I can think of few things I’d rather less do than work in a restaurant kitchen. I like the quiet of my kitchen. I like the alone-time I get in there. I like cooking for grateful family and friends; people who would never think of sending something back.

While in no way a chef, I am an extremely accomplished professional cook (though I say it myself, as my grandmother used to say). I know that just because something is “easy” for me in the kitchen does not mean it will be so for everyone.

Yesterday I was reminded that there is a reason we hadn’t had this gratin in a long time even though it is so very delicious. The reason is that it is a total pain in the ass to make. It involves the cleaning of artichokes – paring down these mighty thorned thistles into tender, sweet hearts. I’ve done it before, many times, and I work quickly. It took me 20-plus minutes to turn five large artichokes into a pile of slivered hearts floating in acidolated water, ready to layer into the gratin. I don’t want to think about how long it might take less practiced hands (or how quickly a true chef might turn those puppies around).

Artichoke potato gratin

Cleaning the artichokes is a pain, but this gratin is tasty. We eat it as a main dish with a salad, but you could serve it alongside a nice roast chicken or grilled salmon.

4 or 5 large artichokes

6 large Yukon Gold potatoes or medium Russet potatoes

2 Tablespoons butter

Salt and freshly ground black or white pepper

2 cups grated cheese – I like to use sheep milk cheeses like Pecorino or Petit Basque, but Parmesan or gruyere work great, too

1 cup chicken broth

Preheat oven to 400.

First things first, you really do need to turn those artichokes into artichoke hearts (lucky for you, I took those pictures!). Very thinly slice each heart. Keep them from browning too much by putting them in a bowl of cool water to which you have added lemon juice or vinegar.

Now peel the potatoes and slice them all very thinly. Fun!

Rub a 9×13 (or similar) baking dish or gratin pan with 1 Tablespoon of the butter. Arrange a single layer of heavily overlapping potato slices. Sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper. Spread half of the artichoke heart slices (patted dry) over the potatoes.

Add another single layer of potatoes. Sprinkle with half of the cheese. Layer another group of potato slices. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and the remaining artichoke heart slices. Next, add a final layer of potatoes – these will be on top so make it pretty!

Now gently spoon the chicken broth over the dish. Sprinkle the top with salt and pepper, cover with foil, and bake until just tender, about 40 minutes.

Uncover, sprinkle on remaining cheese, dot the whole thing with the remaining tablespoon of butter, and bake until completely tender, bubbling, and brown – about 20 more minutes. If you can stand it, let the gratin sit for about 10 minutes before you cut into it.

Last week, before the lefse extravaganza, one of my other San Francisco Bay Area cousins (the Watson cousins have a quorum going – four out of seven of us live in the Bay Area; if you count Monterey, which is a questionable move, the number goes to five out of seven – impressive considering not a single one of us is from here) stopped by after work to make samosas. Why samosas? We really don’t know. I taught her how to make gougères last fall (for her book club meeting when they were to discuss My Life in France – the inspirational tale of Julia Child’s time in France, including embarking on her culinary career at the tender age of 37) and we had a rollicking good time and wanted to do it again.

So we made 110 samosas. I mean, if you’re going to get a pan of oil bubbling and pull out the rolling pins out and cover the kitchen in flour, you might as well have something to show for it at the end of the day, no?

First, the fillings. One potato. One lamb. I make no claims to even the remotest authenticity. We didn’t even fill them right. We gave up and filled them like ravioli or pierogi.

Potato Samosa Filling

This is what most people think of when they think “samosa” (or, I suppose, if they think “samosa”). This filling was soft and fluffy lightly spiced and full of little seeds – cumin, fennel, and mustard – to give it plenty of flavor. If you want to make them more like samosas you get at most Indian restaurants in the States, throw in about a cup of frozen peas towards the end.

4 large Yukon Gold potatoes

Salt

1 large onion, chopped

2 Tablespoons vegetable oil

1 teaspoon cumin seeds

1 teaspoon fennel seeds

1 teaspoon mustard seeds

3 dried small red chiles

10 fenugreek seeds

1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric

1 Tablespoon lemon juice, plus more to taste

Put potatoes in a large pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil and add about a tablespoon of salt – you want the water to actually taste salty. Cook until potatoes are tender all the way through, 20 to 30 minutes.

Put potatoes through a ricer or peel and chop – the choice is yours. My cousin “chopped” ours into a mash. It was all very even and precise. She’s a lawyer.

Meanwhile, you can heat another pan over high heat and cook the onions in the oil until they start to brown , adjusting the heat so they don’t burn before they soften. Or, do as we did and wait for that potato pot to be drained and use it to avoid washing a pot. Yes, I’m that lazy about washing dishes.

When the onions are starting to brown, increase heat to high if necessary and add the cumin seeds, fennel seeds, and mustard seeds. Cover and cook until the mustard seeds stop popping, about 2 minutes.

Add chiles, fenugreek seeds, and turmeric. Stir to combine and then stir in the cooked chopped or mashed potatoes. Cook, stirring, to keep potatoes from sticking too much to the pan (they’ll come up when you add the lemon juice in a moment, so there’s no need to panic), until flavors blend a bit, about 5 minutes. Add salt to taste if needed and drizzle whole mixture with lemon juice. Stir to pick up bits of potato on bottom of the pan and transfer to a bowl to cool a bit.

Lamb Samosa Filling

This is essentially kheema, a spiced ground meat dish that goes with rice or bread or potatoes and makes a great stuffing for vegetables that can be stuffed.

1 Tablespoon vegetable oil

2 large onions, chopped

6 cloves garlic, minced

2-inch piece of fresh ginger, grated

1 1/2 pounds ground lamb

6 whole cloves

6 black peppercorns

2 bay leaves

3 dried red hot chiles

1 teaspoon ground coriander

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric

1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon

3 chopped tomatoes (fresh or canned)

1/2 teaspoon salt

Lemon juice

In a large frying pan or pot, heat oil over medium high heat. Add onions and cook, stirring, until soft, about 3 minutes. Add garlic and ginger and cook, stirring, until very fragrant, about 1 minute. Add lamb and cook, stirring as you see fit, until cooked through. Add cloves, peppercorns, bay leaves, chiles, coriander, cumin, turmeric, and cinnamon. Stir to combine. Stir in tomato, salt, and 1/2 cup water. Cover, reduce heat to maintain a simmer, and cook for about 45 minutes. Remove cover, taste and add more salt if you like, and cook off any remaining liquid. Stir in lemon juice and transfer to a bowl to cool.

You will notice that the potato and lamb samosas look quite different on their outsides and well as their ins. We baked the lamb ones – since they had plenty of unctuous tasty fat in them to keep them moist anyway.

So, onto the dough (tired yet?). Use your fingers to work 3 tablespoons of vegetable oil into 2 cups whole wheat pastry flour mixed with 1/2 teaspoon salt. Stir in 1/2 cup water. You may need to add another 1/4 cup to make a workable dough. Knead it in the bowl until it holds together as a ball. Cut into 20 – 30 pieces and cover with plastic wrap or a damp kitchen towel. Work with one ball at a time.

On a floured work surface roll each ball into a 4-inch circle. Cut the circle in half. Now you can fold the half-circle in half and pinch the cut sides together to form a cone for a traditional samosa shape and fill the cone about 3/4 full of filling and then crimp the end shut, or just fill it and crimp the edges as we ended up doing because we were so tired and lacked proper Bengali skills. Place filled samosas on a lightly floured baking sheet.

When you’re ready to cook you can either bake them for about 20 minutes in a 375 oven and/or heat about 1/2 inch of vegetable oil in a heavy pot or cast iron pan over medium high heat to 350 – 375 degrees. Fry, in batches and without crowding the samosas – until golden on each side, about 3 minutes per side. Drain on paper towels or a cooling rack.

We were total heathens who just shoved them in our mouths as we went. I really just do not want to think about how many we ate as we filled and fried. A lot. We officially ate a whole butt-load of samosas. And then some. Luckily, I had made a cilantro mint chutney. It’s chock-full of vitamin A.

When I first went – and this is dating myself significantly – the tapas craze had not yet hit these New World shores. Tapas in Spain, where they are everywhere, are different from tapas in the U.S. There you don’t settle down for the evening and order a bunch of tiny plates in one restaurant. No, there you grab a drink and whatever tapas a particular bar is best at one place and move on to the next spot for another glass and a different snack: gambas a la pancha, coquettascroquetas, bocalones boquerones, and, of course, patatas bravas.

“Brave potatoes” have lived in my mind ever since. I finally got it together this week and made some. Shazam! I nailed it the first time out of the gate. We ate them as part of dinner, but if the potatoes were cut into bite-size pieces and toothpicks were used, these would have been fabulous passed hors d’œuvres.

Patatas bravas

The sauce can be poured on or used more as a dip – in any case, make sure not to sauce the potatoes too heavily. This will be difficult because the sauce is crazy good. So good, in fact, that you may want to make a double batch and eat the extras with a spoon before you go to bed.

About a pound of potatoes – Russets or Yukon Gold work well

3 Tablespoons olive oil, divided

1/2 small onion, finely chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

1/2 teaspoon salt, plus more to taste

1 teaspoon hot paprika

1/2 teaspoon red chile flakes or a small red chile, minced

1/4 cup dry white wine

1 cup pureed peeled tomatoes or tomato sauce

Tabasco, if you like

Cut small potatoes in half or into quarters, or cut them into bite-size cubes – whatever you like. Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil in a large, heavy pot or cast iron pan over medium high heat. Add potatoes, in a single layer if you can, and cook, partially covered, until browned on one side, 5 to 10 minutes. Turn to brown on other side(s) and cook, again partially covered, until potatoes are browned and tender.

Meanwhile, in a small saucepan over medium heat, heat the remaining tablespoon of oil. Add onions and garlic and salt and cook, stirring frequently, until onions are soft, about 3 minutes.  Add paprika and chile and cook, stirring, for about a minute. Add white wine and cook, stirring, until most of the wine has evaporated. Add tomato sauce, stir to combine, and adjust heat to maintain a gentle simmer. Cook, uncovered and relatively undisturbed (try to avoid stirring it if you can) until the sauce is thick, about 20 minutes. Taste the sauce and add more salt or some Tabasco, if you like.

You can whirl the sauce in a blender to smooth it out, if you like, but I rather dug the ever-so-slightly chunkiness of the unadulterated version pictured above.

Serve potatoes with sauce in whatever way you see fit.

It is, perhaps, unfair to characterize this soup as a “clean the fridge” creation. It was really terribly delicious and satisfying – neither my dashing husband nor grade school son said anything other than “more please” about it – but I was using stuff up. Using it up fast. Using it up before I’d have to throw it out. So I hacked a hunk of bacon that had been sitting in the back of the freezer into pieces and put it in a pot and sweated out its fat – adding a bit of water now and then to keep it from scorching before all the fat had melted. While that went down, I sliced a small onion that looked like it was thinking about sprouting, chopped a small savoy cabbage that needed a few wilted outer leaves pulled off of it first, and diced a carrot that was holding its own but I couldn’t remember when it had made its way into the fridge in the first place, which is never a good sign.

All of this was sauteed in the pot with the bacon and a bit of butter and a bit of olive oil (I was hedging all fat bets) until they softened a bit, then I threw in the potatoes that needed some trimming as they were chopped, a bunch  of chicken broth, and brought the whole thing to a boil.

I simmered it all down, cooked it until everything was tender and the flavors had all blended together nicely – about 25 minutes or so, and served it up with some chopped parsley on top for color. So pretty! So fresh!

A whole grain baguette and two half-eaten hunks of cheese were placed on the table along with the soup and we had ourselves a tasty, frugal, quite French (although the potatoes would have been peeled and the whole thing likely pureed) dinner. And the fridge? It’s all ready to be filled, yet again.

I realize, I really and truly do, that most of you are not going to make your own potato gnocchi. I can see that it seems daunting. It seems messy. It seems like a lot of work. I suppose it is all of those things, in a way. But it’s all relative, isn’t it? The daunting, the messy, the time-consuming – these are the kitchen projects I like the best. And, as my dad once said, “The homemade kind is always better.”

We were having some friends over and I was trying to keep things quite simple. It was just another couple and us – we were only hosting because we couldn’t find a sitter. (I have found that there are two types of people that work well as dinner party friends when you have a school-age kid – people with similar school-age kids and people without any children at all.) They insisted on bringing a starter and wine and dessert, claiming we always host because of the sitter issue. I didn’t even put up a fight but tried to figure out a meal that wouldn’t suck up my entire day but would also use some of the potatoes from our CSA that have piled up a bit in the fridge.

I was brainstorming with the family and Ernest suggested gnocchi. Daunting, messy, and time-consuming? Not really that much since I already had some pesto in the fridge I had made so all I had to do was make the dumplings – and I’ve done that before and, in the end, it doesn’t take that much time (fair warning: so says the person who loves to do things in the kitchen).

So I boiled a pound and a half of yukon gold potatoes, starting them in a pot of cold water, adding a tablespoon of salt once the water was boiling, and avoided pricking them to test for doneness too terribly much lest the potatoes get waterlogged.

I drained them, donned a latex glove to protect my hand from the heat as I scraped the skin off each hot potato.

They were then pushed through a ricer (my favorite way to mash potatoes thoroughly and completely) and mixed with one and a half cups of flour.

This dough, still warm from the boiled potatoes, feels a lot like playdough and is quite fun to work with. I divided it into four and rolled out each quarter into an inch-thick snake on a very well floured surface.

This potato dough snake was then cut into bite-size pieces (a table knife works fine and reminds me of pre-school).

So far so easy, right? Next, to make the dumplings gnocchi-shaped, I simply took each little knob of dough and ran in down the tines of a fork, pushing it with my thumb so it ends up with the tine marks on one side and the thumbprint on the other. It takes a few dumplings to get the hang of it, but once you’ve figured out the motion you can gnocchify an entire batch of dumplings in less than five minutes.

The gnocchi were then laid out on a very well floured tray, covered with a clean towel and sat, waiting patiently, for their big moment to arrive.

The stage was set: Two big pots of water brought to a boil. Serving platter in warm oven. Water salted. Pesto brought to room temperature. A bit of the pesto spread on the serving platter. Bite-size pieces of green bean thrown in the water and cooked a few minutes before being fished out with a slotted spoon and put on the serving platter.

Then the gnocchi were added – half to each pot of water (otherwise cook in two batches). They sank right to the bottom of the pot and got a swift yet decisive stir. After about a minute they floated to the top of the water as were allowed to cook for about 10 seconds while they floated and then, like the green beans before them, they were lifted out of the water and onto the serving platter. Once all the gnocchi were out, the pesto was added and everything tossed. The platter was brought – triumphant – to the table with parmesan and a grater for each person to top their own.

Has is becoming my habit, a recipe -style recipe for Potato Gnocchi is over at Local Foods. Oh, and there’s one there for Pesto, too.

Sure, the potatoes I threw on the grill got a bit, shall we say, dark. They really weren’t burnt though, I swear. Well, maybe a tiny bit – but that was just on the skin! The outside got a nice thick layer of crisped and crusty potato chip and the inside became a soft, fluffy mass of mashed potato.

As much as I left them on the grill a bit too long, I also put them on the grill a bit too early.

I know – what was I thinking, right? Whole chicken and little potatoes on the grill at the same time? I was distracted by other parents who stopped by to pick up their child and we got to talking… when I went to check, the potatoes were done. So I took them off and let the chicken sit there, over its pan of water to catch the drippings, next to a pan of wood chips to make it smoky, coated with plenty of butter and salt, until it turned the most perfect crispy brown as if it had spent the summer in St. Tropez in the 70s with a bottle of baby oil improved with drops of iodine.

Of course, I forgot to take a picture. You’re going to have to take my word for it: it was glorious.

There were, however, a solid 4o minutes between when I removed the potatoes from the grill and when the chicken was ready to eat. Did I keep them warm by tenting them with foil? Put them in a low oven? No. Instead of these sensible, grown-up options, my dashing husband and I stood around our tiny Ikea kitchen cart “island” sprinkling salt and stuffing the hot potatoes into our pie holes.

Want to make them yourself? Toss small potatoes (these were russian reds – yellow finns would be awfully good too) with a bit of olive oil and salt. Throw them on a hot grill until they are cooked through. How long that takes depends on your grill, how much cool Pacific wind is whipping towards your house, and how engaged you are in a discussion of cricket, summer camps, and home renovation. If you think to turn them, that would be cool, but my experience demonstrates that’s an optional move.

As I wrote “depression friendly dinners” I was thinking of the economic recession-depression, but I realize that I had also cooked up dishes that would be quite comforting in the face of emotional blues and might even be able to tempt someone sequestered in psychological depression to take a bite or two.

I was just out to make use of the food we had in the fridge – making room for the next CSA box and avoiding wasting food. There was a last bit of salad – that got tossed with a vinaigrette, natch. But a bag of new red potatoes and a bunch of bits of cheese were hanging out in there too. At first I thought: potato gratin! But new red potatoes aren’t really the best for baking, they’re better for boiling or steaming. Just the teeniest bit of brainstorming and I remembered the magic that is Welsh rarebit (a.k.a. Welsh rabbit) – an ale and cheese sauce that is usually poured over toast.

Welsh rarebit

Boil or steam potatoes or any other vegetable that would be good with cheese sauce poured over it (so that’s pretty much anything, right?) or toast some bread.

Melt 2 Tbsp. butter in a saucepan over medium heat. When the butter is fully melted and stops foaming but hasn’t started to brown at all, sprinkle in 3 Tbsp. whole wheat pastry flour (or just plain old flour if you like, but even this bit of whole wheat added a nice nuttiness to the final sauce) and whisk to combine the butter and flour. Cook and whisk until you smell cooked rather than raw flour – it smells like pie crust. No sense of smell or don’t know what I’m talking about here? Try 2 to 3 minutes and you should be fine. While still whisking, slowly pour in a 12-oz. bottle of beer or ale. When you get a smooth mixture, cook, whisking frequently, until the sauce starts to thicken slightly. Add about 8 oz. of cheese cut into small chunks or shredded – an aged cheddar would, of course, be lovely, as would an aged gouda. I just used assorted bits from the cheese drawer. Whisk until cheese is melted. Add about 1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce*, if you like, and 1/2 tsp. dry mustard. Add salt to taste and hot sauce to taste, if you like. If using potatoes, smash them a bit so their starchy insides can absorb the cheese sauce. Pour sauce over potatoes or vegetables or toast and garnish with freshly ground black pepper if you’re so inclined.

Maybe now you have some leftover boiled potatoes and some leftover cheese sauce. Sure, you could just reheat them both and have the rarebit all over again, which would be a perfectly fine thing to do. Or, maybe, like me, visions of potato cheese soup dance in your head. If you want to make those dreams a reality, first peel and mash the leftover potatoes – for a smooth soup run them through a food mill or ricer. Then bring a bottle of beer or ale to a boil in a medium saucepan. Whisk in the leftover (now very thickened) cheese sauce until everything is smooth. Stir in mashed potatoes and heat until hot. Add salt and pepper to taste. If you have some spring onions or green onions hanging around, slice them up for perfectly pungent and crunchy garnish. If you also have a chile you could slice that up and add it in with the onion for spicy delicious measure:

There, doesn’t that feel better? Or sort of virtuous? Whenever I don’t buy anything to make dinner I feel like I’m saving money. Sure, I realize we spent money buying the things I find in the fridge and cupboards in order to make the “free” meals, but it still feels good. It feels good to save the money, it feels good not to waste things, it feels good to come up with ways to use the things we have instead of mindlessly buying more more more.

* Full confession: I cannot say the word “Worcestershire.” I don’t know what it is. I add extra t’s and entire syllables. Every time I try to say it my dashing husband laughs his ass off.

“Do you have any secrets for making potato pancakes?” I innocently asked my friend.

“I have many, ” she said. “First, you need to be Jewish.”

Hmmm… my master plan for dinner was, I now saw, ill-considered. My dashing husband had requested fish for dinner. Ernest had expressed a perennial desire for dumplings or noodles. But both of those plans required a trip to the store and our kitchen was full of food. Potatoes and eggs, in particular, were in great quantity. My thoughts turned, as always, to a Spanish tortilla. But I sensed that both ignoring the dinner requests I had pointedly solicited the night before and serving yet another tortilla might be legitimately viewed as an aggressive act by my family.

So I did a quick brainstorming, including a brief stop to think about making Ernest’s dream meal: the bacon, eggs sunny-side-up, and patties of hash browns featured on the box of the electric griddle that we store in the basement for when I make pancakes. Alas, we had no bacon. I could hear his wails of protest and decided to move along to other potato-and-egg dinner ideas.

Potato pancakes! Latkes! Of course. Shredded potato and egg and a bit of flour. Perfect. We had some various dairy elements hanging around to top them with, as well as other random condiments that could possibly be put to use. Plus, they would be good with the red cabbage slaw I was planning to make in order to use one of the two heads of red cabbage camping out in the hydrator.

So I grated a pound of potatoes and put them in a large bowl of cold water so they wouldn’t turn brown. I went to grab an onion and… no onion. I could have sworn there was a spring onion hanging around the fridge, but it was gone. Hmmm… potato pancakes with no onion. Oh well. I noticed the two very small sweet potatoes that came in our CSA box last week sitting on the counter. I peeled them and grated them and threw them in with their not-sweet brethren.

At that point I realized I 1) had never made potato pancakes before and 2) was working without a recipe or guidance beyond that I gleaned from working at Sunset while a latke story was in development.

My friend’s derision of said story when it was published made me think I probably did not know what I was doing. So, despite the fact that it was probably the worst time of the day to call someone with two small children, I dialed her number.

That’s when I found out I was doomed before I began. I am not, you see, Jewish. Despite my love of the All-of-a-Kind Family series, reading them obsessively in grade school did not, no matter how much I wished it, magically transport my Norwegian-Scottish self into the teeming Lower East Side food markets that sounded like such fun – with their pickles and lox skin and pretzel women and hot chickpeas – in the books (although it did teach me a whole hell of a lot about Jewish holidays, a shocking amount of which I’ve retained).

After breaking my heart with her hard truth about latkes, my dear friend kindly moved onto her second point: the importance of wringing out the water from the shredded vegetables. “You cannot get them dry enough,” she proclaimed, “a man is very useful for this. Really, you cannot wring them enough.”

Strike two: I was home alone and very much not a man. One of the ways in which I am not like a man is my incredible lack of upper-body strength.

“I like to add some celery root,” she said. I explained that I didn’t have any and didn’t have time to run to the store.

“That’s too bad,” she said, “it really adds a nice flavor.”

“I did add some sweet potato,” I offered.

“I am not a fan,” she said.

And… strike three. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was out of onion. I thanked her and went on my now not-at-all merry way with my dinner plans.

I wrung out the shredded potatoes with two separate kitchen towels while Ernest cracked six small eggs into a huge bowl and whisked them smooth. We stirred in the pretty-darn dry shreds, added salt and pepper and a few tablespoons of flour.

Then I did something just horrible. I asked Ernest to get the griddle. I just couldn’t deal with frying. It would be messy and smelly and I already sensed that these were not going to be great, so damning them to a mediocre fate for my own convenience seemed like the reasonable thing to do.

So I cooked them into child-hand sized fritters on the griddle – using the peanut oil my friend recommended but not at all in the way she intended. If a person put the whole idea of latkes and their lacy crispy addictiveness out of their mind, the fritters were pretty good. They were tender and eggy and a delightful vehicle for horseradish cream.

But when my dashing husband had walked in the door and saw me making something and asked what it was, I knew they were not latkes. They did not even deserve the moniker of “potato pancake.”

“Potato fritters,” I said, a bit sad, a bit dejected, but hungry for dinner.

Yeah, that was dinner. It was good, bad, and embarrassing.

Here’s what happened: My dashing husband is out of town. I had a meeting at my house that we scheduled for a late lunch so I could experiment on the other attendees (they were very nice about it) and make them taste/eat a recipe I was developing for a high-paying recipe contest* which I was going to enter because, as you may have noticed, the economy appears to be in the tank and freelance work is sparse and some people and even large corporations seem to think it is okay to not pay people for work done… but I digress. I wanted to post a “how to make homemade potato chips” over at Local Foods in time for the Superbowl because, I’ve been told, people are always looking for “fun” ways to entertain at their Superbowl parties (no, I don’t really understand any of that sentence either). So, I made potato chips for us to snack on, among other delicacies. And the meeting was going okay. Not great, but okay. One person couldn’t show because of injuries sustained while hiking, another showed despite being in the process of recovering from food poisoning and was thus unable to really, you know, help eat all the food. And then, just as we were getting down to the business at hand and making some progress on our joint projects, the phone rang (or rather the call waiting beeped through on the speaker phone on which we were talking to our injured participant) and it was Ernest’s school. “Hi Molly,” the friendly voice said, “this is [the school secretary]. Ernest threw up.”

I thanked her for calling, hung up, drove to school, picked up the saddest looking boy I’ve ever seen, got him home, put him in the bath, and gave the rest of the meeting the old college try but was, as you might imagine, pretty distracted.

So, after the meeting ended, and after I cleaned the kitchen, and after I wrote up my notes from the recipes I worked on, and after I got him into bed early with “no dinner, Mama, no dinner,” and I finally headed down to eat my own dinner… well, that bowl of potato chips looked really good. And so I ate them. All that were left. I put extra smoked salt on them and crunched my way through the whole bowl and the batches draining on the cooling rack too and didn’t have a salad or yogurt or anything to try and pretend that I didn’t just eat a bowl of potato chips for dinner.

And that, my dear internets, is why I don’t keep potato chips in the house. I am powerless before their salty crispness!

* Um, this in also embarrassing: When I went to enter the recipe in the contest I realized I am ineligible. Because, clever as I am I don’t think I could convince someone that I’m not a “professional food writer” what with getting paid every now and again to write about food and being so billed in more than one easily accessed internet site. Great. I guess I should just go buy lottery tickets and call it a day.