Applesauce and Latkes!

Last week we talked about Hanukkah. To celebrate our first winter holiday of December, we made applesauce, latkes, menorahs and dreidels! 

We made our applesauce in the crockpot and it was SUPER easy! All we needed were apples, water and sugar. That's it! You can add cinnamon if you want, but we didn't in our recipe.

 

First, I peeled each of the kid's apples, then helped them slice their apples with the apple corer. They did an awesome job coring those apples!

After we got all of our apples cored, the kids used plastic knives (after a class discussion on knife safety) and cut their apples into small chunks. They did an awesome job cutting their apples, too!

Leave it to me to forget measuring cups at home and not grab the kitchen cart at school. So our classroom measuring containers had to do, and they worked out just fine!

After our apple cooked for a few hours, I stuck them in the blender, drained the excess water, and blended them up! I put our sauce back in the crock pot and let it cool, then put it in the fridge over night so we could have chilled applesauce with our warm latkes the next day.

After making our homemade applesauce, we spent the next day making latkes! We didn't have as much time for our latkes as we did for our applesauce, so the kids did a lot more watching than helping.

For our latkes we used potatoes, eggs, salt, pepper and flour.

First, we peeled our potatoes and cut out any bad parts that we saw. 

Next, we shredded the potatoes with a mandolin to make them much thinner. I shredded them over some cheesecloth since we need them inside of it in our next step.

Once our potatoes were shredded, we squeezed them inside of our cheesecloth until as much liquid as we could get out of them was sitting in the bottom of our bowl. We talked about how potatoes have a lot of water in them and named some other vegetables that have a lot of water in them, too.

After that, all we had left to do was add the eggs, flour, salt and pepper, then fry them up!

I finished up our frying while the kids packed up (we were really running out of time!) and had our snack right before the bell rang for us to head out.

The kids also spent the week making paper plate menorahs and paper dreidels.