In our house, one of our favorite staple recipes is potato kugel. The recipe for it in The Clueless Vegetarian calls for no ingredients we don't habitually have in the house (aside from fresh parsley, which is optional) and makes a generous panful. Eked out by applesauce and some frozen peas, it's a complete meal and leaves us with plenty of leftovers.
However, a whole lot as we experience this kugel, there are several methods wherein it can be advanced. First, it is a piece time-eating; it takes a full hour to bake, plus guidance time. The education itself is a bit fiddly, too, calling that lets in you to heat the oil inside the baking pan for five minutes earlier than stirring it into the potato aggregate and then dumping the lot back into the pan. And talking of oil, there can be pretty a whole lot of it inside the recipe?Approximately six tablespoons. Granted, it's far for twelve servings of kugel, but still, it appeared like it must be possible to lessen it down as a minimum a bit. And sooner or later, the kugel bakes in a large, flat pan, and the middle quantities are in no manner quite as pinnacle because the components round the rims, which prepare dinner up greater brown and crispy.
So Brian did a little tinkering with the recipe and came up with a revised version that addresses all these problems. The ingredients are basically the same, but the real key difference is that the kugel is baked, not in a big glass pan, but in a cast-iron skillet, like a frittata. The resulting kugel is only about half the size of the Clueless Vegetarian version, so it doesn't feed us for as many meals, but it cooks up in half the time with only one-third as much oil, and it's crispy and delicious throughout. (It's actually a bit of a cheat to make this the Recipe of the Month for September, since Brian first came up with the idea in late August. However, the first time he made it, he did it with onion, just like the original version; when he cooked it this week, he substituted leeks from the garden, and I think that makes the dish even better. So while we first tried the recipe in late August, it was only perfected in September.)
SKILLET KUGEL
1. Preheat oven to 375?F.
2. In a big bowl, blend together:
About three medium potatoes, grated (skins and all)
1 medium onion or leek, finely chopped
1/4 c. Flour
1 tsp. Salt
2 eggs 3. Heat about 2 tablespoons of oil over immoderate warm temperature in a solid iron skillet or an oven-secure nonstick skillet, 9-10 inches in diameter.
Four. When the oil is hot, add within the potato aggregate, flatten it right down to fill the entire pan, and cook dinner it on high for one extra minute.
Five. Transfer the pan to the oven and bake for approximately 20 mins.
6. Remove the pan from the oven and turn the kugel. The only way to do that with out risk of breakage is to slide it from the pan onto a huge plate, then cowl it with a second plate, invert it, and slide it decrease lower back into the pan.
7. Bake any other 10 mins. Remove from oven and allow cool barely earlier than serving.
