Yummy Chanuka Foods

For Shabbos dinner, I am making a delicious Yankee pot roast with latkes and braised sweet and sour red cabbage. The combination of the rich gravy on crispy latkes is to die for. Dessert will be parve donuts, fried apple pies, Sharon’s Sorbet, and Stella d’Oro cookies. As an additional side dish to go with the meat, we’re having roasted broccoli with olive oil and spices.

As a forshpeis, we are having first some fried tilapia with a lemon dill tartar sauce, along with salads, and then matzah ball soup, and empanadas- fried Cuban meat pies. A picadillo is made first, with onion, garlic, ground beef, Spanish tomato sauce, olive oil, Badia Adobo seasoning, sofrito (homemade- haven’t yet found one kosher), and fresh cilantro and culantro, with some other spices. This mixture is spooned into parve pastry discs (made with ice cold beef suet from Grow and Behold and Crisco), crimped into little pies, and fried.

Another fun oil-themed thing we did earlier in the week was a milchig Olive Oil tasting. We managed to get a lot of hechshered extra virgin olive oil- from Greece, Israel, Italy, and made some flavored olive oils with these. Some were spicy, some were more verdant. It was interesting trying them all, with assorted olives, different breads for dipping, and with feta cheese and fresh mozzarella slices for additional sampling.