Cooking On Sale

Ugh. Whenever I try to make foods that need to be deep fried, I fail miserably. I once tried to make falafel and ended up with some sort of parsley-chick pea deep fried soup. I tried drain the oil from it and throw it on a pita, but even after using a paper towel to pat out the oil, it still didn’t taste right.

So when I decided to make sweet potato pancakes, I don’t know why I thought it would turn out any better. I should’ve just expected another failure. Here’s a fun list of my mistakes:

1. Don’t add cranberries to the pancakes. It may seem like a good idea. You think that sweet potatoes and cranberries would go well together, right? It’s like Thanksgiving, right? Wrong.
Dried cranberries apparently don’t belong in the deep fryer. They turn black and just become bitter. Don’t even go there. By the time the sweet potatoes cooked through, the cranberries had burned. If pulled the pancakes from the deep fryer before the cranberries burned, the potatoes were still raw.
Moral of this story: when you’re deep frying, make sure that all ingredients fry at a similar rate so you don’t end up with undercooked pancakes or burned cranberries. Or both.

2. Use enough oil. You should probably set up a real deep fryer. I sometimes try to skimp on the oil and put a thin layer in a frying pan and flip the pancakes, but they never flip well. It also always burns the edges of them because the edges touch the oil for twice as long as the center of the pancakes where they’re thicker. I should probably just suck it up and fill a pot with oil and use that instead.

3. Don’t use a plastic spatula. The oil gets hot. Hotter than boiling water. It can melt plastic. When your pancakes are tainted with spatula-bits they are pretty much inedible. You’ll want either a metal spatula or one of those net-things that you use for deep frying. It looks like this.

So I will continue in my endeavor to create the perfect potato pancake. I keep trying to resemble Zaftigs’s pancakes. I’m kind of obsessed with their “Potato Pancakes with Smoked Salmon with Dill-Lime Sour Cream,” but I still cannot for the life of me figure out how they do it. Any suggestions?

Currently Cooking To:

Lady Gaga. Her new single, “Bad Romance” is just wonderful. I mean, it may be a little weird and quirky and some of it is in French but that’s Lady Gaga fabulous for you. Check out this video of her performing on SNL. She performs “Bad Romance” and “Poker Face” at the piano after singing “Lovegame.” Also, this video proves to those doubters out there that Lady Gaga is actually a pretty woman. You go, Lady Gaga!

Also, have some songs:
Lady Gaga – Bad Romance
Lady Gaga – Alejandro
Lady Gaga – No Way