grandma strom

One of my favorite memories as a kid was getting together with my grandmother to make potato pancakes.  It was a traditional meal that her family brought over to the US from Czechoslovakia (I think?)  In the beginning, my mom, sister, & I used go to over to my grandparents house for an afternoon and cook up a storm.  My grandfather never liked the smell of the house during our party, so in the later years, he brought my grandma to our house to stink it up.  It was always the same, she would come in tow with a large metal bowl full of mashed potatoes she had made the night before, her cast iron pan, rolling pin, and rolling mat.  They would enter the house and my grandpa would announce “Meals on Wheels has arrived”!  So cute!!!  My grandmother would roll out the mashed potato mixture on a lightly floured mat so thin you could almost see through them, then they would go into the hot pan with a little butter and cook for only a couple minutes on each side until they started to bubble and brown, once removed – we stacked them on a plate with a pat of butter in between each pancake.  (I should mention that my sister had her own little thing going on on the side, she liked to make “mini” pancakes and cook them along side the larger ones.  Not sure at what point this started but it was cute!)  This would continue until all of the potatoes were gone and we had a towering stack!  We would each snag one here and there and start tearing off pieces to enjoy.  When we were all done, we would all sit down & eat together.  I am not sure why, but these pancakes were the most scrumptious meal!  

This tradition continued at least once a year until my grandmother passed almost 10 years ago.  Since then, I have tried numerous times to recreate these and every time had the same disappointing result.  And this time all the way across the country in my little dorm kitchen was no exception.  I can’t seem to roll the pancakes thin enough without them breaking apart… I got SO frustrated this time, I put an egg into part of the mixture to hopefully bind everything together.  This helped, but they did not end up looking like I had remembered & they had to cook longer because they were thicker.  I still had a batch of some that I managed to roll as thin as I could (with a glass cup because I didn’t want to buy a rolling pin), these were the best ones & tasted the most like what I remembered.  The whole process took about 2 hours and I still didn’t achieve the end result I wanted.  Not sure why I keep hoping for a different result when the process is the same!  I am convinced that there is something that I am missing. 

Even though they weren’t what I was hoping for, they were still edible and Nick and I devoured all of them…

 

my mess, on the plate are my attempt at rolling out the original pancakes

in the pan, they are very small and thick