The Laws Of Physics Did Not Apply

Yesterday, I had a hankering for supper to have some comfort food.

There are a handful of things I make for comfort food (remember my orange spaghetti stories!) and one of the things on my list is our potato pancakes.

Now this is a relatively simple dish, but it is time consuming. First of all, you need the perfect grater, which is shown to the left. This grater has to have the exactly right sized holes and not all graters do.

Some have said that I should move up to the food processor age and do my pancakes that way. But, i say nay to that. I don't think the food processors grate the potatoes to the correct consistency. You have to have THIS grater.

Along with the correct grater, you need the perfect potatoes. You can't just decide right now that you want to have potato pancakes. You have to decide you're going to have them about three to four weeks from now. You really need old Idaho potatoes - the more eyes on them the better! New potatoes just don't work right, just ask my sister Cathie. She had an entire batch she had to throw out because new potatoes suck in pancakes.

It's a simple recipe. Grate as many potatoes as you're going to eat, then do a few more because these are great to munch on each time you walk through the kitchen after dinner.

Add an egg or two, some salt and pepper to taste and then flour. You add enough flour so that when you put a spoon full of the mixture into the hot Crisco, it doesn't spatter from too much water in the batter. That's it. Really easy. The hard part is frying all of the pancakes in the hot oil. There's nary a pancake dinner that goes by that I don't have at least one burn from the grease. But, it's so worth it.

Now with three of us here, I make a lot more pancakes than I used to. The best pan to fry these pancakes in is a cast iron skillet. I have one cast iron skillet that is 10" big and I fit four pancakes at a time. That's just too slow to feed three of us.

So, I grab my 10" stainless steel fry pan and put four more pancakes in there. They do fry up ok in the stainless steel, but it's a lot slower. I will get two batches made in the cast iron skillet in the time it takes to do one batch in the stainless steel skillet. Well, a little help using the stainless steel is better than nothing.

I can't tell you how many batches I've made this way in my years of cooking. Piece of cake, I could do it in my sleep.

Well, yesterday I was like in the twilight zone or something as something just wasn't right.

The potatoes are regular Idaho potatoes from Sam's Club. I thought they were at least three weeks old, but maybe they weren't. They felt ok as I was peeling them but when I went to grate them, they were softer than I expected. Usually your arm gets pretty damn sore grating through all of them spuds so I end up calling on Ron and Phil to come down and take turns grating. This time, I did the entire batch by myself. The potatoes almost felt like they wanted to melt right through the grater. It was strange.

Anyway, I got all of the ingredients in the bowl, it's all mixed up well, a good quarter inch of molten grease is hot in both of my pans and I'm ready to start. I place four spoons of mix into the stainless steel pan, and flatten them into thin cakes with the spoon. Check. I repeated this process in the cast iron pan. Check.

To keep the frying even, I will turn them about 180 degrees in the pan during the frying since with a gas stove they tend to cook faster towards the middle of the pan than on the outsides of the pan. I went to check the stainless steel pan and the bottoms of all of the cakes were very browned. Not burnt, but definitely ready to turn over in the pan! What? I don't even have one batch done yet in the cast iron skillet! From the hot oil, the pancakes go onto a plate with paper towels to get off some of the grease them I put them in a cake pan in a warm oven just so they don't get cold while I wait for all of them to be done and we can all eat together.

Both pans were frying these pancakes faster than I have ever fried them before. I figured it would be well over an hour of frying with the amount of batter I made and I was DONE in 35 minutes.

It has to be some freaky ass spuds that I was using. This pancakes should be nice and flat and crispy and golden brown on both sides. I had the brown part down flat but these damn cakes were not crispy.

It was just down right weird. I have never had my potato pancakes fry up like this. Now, don't think we wasted all of these sub par patties. They all got slathered in Log Cabin syrup and devoured and all of the extras seemed to disappear through the night as well. They were ok, but they weren't really good. I did not feel comforted.

I am disappointed. I just bought a new bag of spuds from Sam's Club on Tuesday. Maybe I should just get another new bag to use in our day to day cooking and leave the ones from Tuesday alone and make pancakes for my birthday dinner on January 16th (hint, hint!). Hmm, that's not a bad idea! They better come out a lot better than this batch did.