But Hannah Did Not Have Potatoes! Latkes with a Tropical Twist.

Happy and joyful Chanukkah, dear Beautiful People!

koolkosherkitchen

Chanukkah is coming, and kids are looking forward to stuffing their faces with latkes – potato pancakes. When I was growing up, we had all kinds of latkes on Chanukkah, and sometimes my grandmother skipped the deruny (potato latkes) altogether because of the variety of other, more interesting ones: carrots with apples, zucchini with raisins, and my father’s favorite rechene (buckwheat) latkes. When a guest inquired about the missing “traditional” kind, she would say, “But Hannah did not have potatoes.” Two burning questions of my childhood were: who was Hannah and why, oh why, couldn’t she get potatoes?

This is the story I put together at the age of about four. In the ancient times, there was a mean king who didn’t want anybody in his kingdom to be Jewish. He sent his soldiers to the Jewish Temple (Temple? we had a Temple? where?) and ordered them…

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