Now the connection between latkes and miracles is clear, there are many ways to make latkes, and many things they can be topped and eaten with in accordance to the eater’s preferences. Latkes can be made from russet potatoes, assorted vegetables, sweet potatoes, and even cheese. The most common toppings for latkes are nothing (as latkes are very tasty just on their own), sour cream, and applesauce. My friends and I prefer to make our latkes out of a combination of shredded russet potatoes, parsnips, and sweet onion. We like to have both sour cream and applesauce on hand to spread on our latkes. I’ll chronicle our recipe below. I’ll leave it to you to choose your toppings—maybe even try out some new ones of your own. If you’re interested in alternative recipes or more latke trivia, you’ll enjoy directing your attention here to the blog of Tori Avey.
Ingredients:
3 large russet potatoes
1 large parsnip
1 medium sweet or white onion (dealer’s choice)
4 large eggs
4 tablespoons of flour
3 teaspoons of salt
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
Oil for frying (we prefer olive oil)
First, you will need to peel and grate your potatoes and parsnip. You will be frying your potatoes, but if for some reason you don’t wish them to discolor prior to frying, you can put your grated potatoes in water. You can grate the vegetables straight into a bowl of water to do this quickly. Next, you will finely chop your onion. Once the potatoes, parsnip, and onion are prepared, you will need to squeeze as much water from the mixture as you can. You can do this by pressing out the water with cheesecloth or tea towels. The removal of moisture is one of the reasons my friends and I like to add parsnips to our latke mix, as parsnips don’t retain as much water as potatoes and onions. It’s important to get all of the excess moisture out of the vegetables so that they will fry agreeably.
Once you’re satisfied with the dryness of your grated vegetables, crack your eggs into a separate container and beat them lightly. Pour them over your vegetables and mix when done. Then add the flour, salt, and pepper and mix well.
Next, you will prepare your oil. It’s important to get the oil to the right temperature. If the temperature is too low, your latkes will be soggy. If it’s too high, they’ll burn on the outside before they’ve cooked all the way through on the inside. If you’re worried about the temperature of your oil, place an unpopped popcorn kernel in it. When the kernel pops, the oil is ready for frying.
Once your oil is ready, it’s time to form your latke mix into pancakes. My friends and I do this by hand, measuring the amount for each latke with the palms of our hands. Latkes are usually small, perfect for sharing and eating with one’s hands. Although larger latkes can be made, they often break apart in the frying pan. Experiment with the size, and see what works for you. Depending on the size of your pan (and your latkes), you’ll be able to fry varying numbers of latkes at a time. I have yet to encounter a pan large enough to allow me to fry all of my latkes at once, so it’s important to set up a drying area for your latkes. A drying rack with a paper towel works nicely—however, if you have many latkes to fry and want to serve them hot and all at once, my friends and I have found that turning our oven to warm and placing newly completed latkes onto a paper towel covered cookie sheet works rather well. The heat of the oven keeps the latkes crispy without letting them get soggy or cold.
Enjoy your finished latkes with your choice or lack of condiment. Just like in everything Bioware has ever created, the choice is yours.
Which brings us to this month’s media tie in. We’ll be talking about choice in video games. We’ll cover the Mass Effect trilogy (both because of hype for Mass Effect: Andromeda and because I just beat them this last December), The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, and Chrono Cross.
If you’ve ever played any of Bioware’s games, you know why we’re talking about Mass Effect. The Mass Effect trilogy was not a classic RPG where you took on the role of a pre-made character. The player decided everything about their version of Commander Shepard from their first name and backstory to the shape and color of their eyebrows (for those of you interested, I played red-headed fem Shep), and then goes on to decide how Commander Shepard reacts to literally every line of dialogue in the game. What’s truly awe inspiring about the amount of reactions available to Shepard is that they affect more than just how the current decision she’s making turns out. Let’s take one of my favorite characters of the game for example. His name is Wrex Urdnot, and he is a krogan.
Krogan are very battle hardy and naturally long lived, but their race is dying out due to a genetic bioweapon called the genophage that hugely increases the number of stillborn offspring birthed. When Wrex finds out that the antagonist of Mass Effect is trying to cure the genophage so he can mass produce brainwashed krogan soldiers, he has a very emotional and violent reaction to the suggestion that all data on the genophage cure be destroyed. If the player hasn’t completed Wrex’s loyalty quest, Shepard doesn’t have the option to talk Wrex down in her dialogue menu, and she is forced to shoot him.
If Wrex survives, he goes on to unite the krogan under his rule in Mass Effect 2. If he does not, Wrex’s brother Wreav is the one to unite the krogan—and Wreav is not as progressive as his brother. Wrex believes the krogan are warlike because of the genophage. He believes that krogan can live in peace together and with other races. Wreav, on the other hand, believes the krogan are superior to other races and that their warring culture shouldn’t be questioned or changed. The direction the krogan species takes and the willingness of other races to help the krogan cure the genophage is hugely affected by Wrex’s presence and absence.
Other decisions are less plot relevant and more relevant to Shepard’s relationships to other characters. These relationships also carry through all three games, affecting the continuity of Shepard’s social life and her situational and dialogue options with other characters. For example, characters Shepard is mean to are less likely to trust her in high stress situations. Be too mean to the wrong person, and you might not have the option to save them in a moment of tension. Depending on Shepard’s gender and romantic inclinations, the player will also have the opportunity to romance certain characters. These can sometimes surprise the player with their bluntness, or be witty and humorous.
My Shepard romanced Garrus—one of the only characters that is on Shepard’s crew in all three games, and a turian. That is to say, Garrus is an alien. Depending on who Shepard romances, the salarian doctor Mordin Solus has romantic advice about how to have safe sex with her partner. If Shepard is romancing an alien, the advice Mordin gives her can be very interesting and ranges from hallucinations when kissing, anaphylactic shock from ingesting semen, and the possible death of her partner if Shepard doesn’t brush her teeth properly.
If Shepard is romancing no one when she has this conversation with Mordin, he will assume Shepard is interested in him (regardless of Shepard’s gender) and will inform her that he isn’t interested.
Shepard’s romances also play a larger part in the game's continuity and bonus scenes. My Shepard romanced Liara in Mass Effect, but romanced Garrus in Mass Effect 2. In Mass Effect 3, both Garrus and Liara talked to Shepard about their past romantic involvement, trying to see if Shephard still felt something for them romantically or not. I let Liara down, but told Garrus that I still felt the same way about him. Because Garrus and Shepard were lovers, Garrus always had extra dialogue for me after missions. Shepard and Garrus also shared extra scenes during climactic moments of the game.
Of course, even Bioware’s complicated choice system isn’t perfect.
Even if you investigate the other dialogue options available to Shepard in this scene, there’s no way to ask Mordin about the time he killed someone with farm equipment. Bioware’s system offers a complex map for Shepard to choose from, and varying routes for the player to follow to the end of the game.
Other choice systems, such as the one in Skyward Sword, have less of an overarching effect on the events of the game and the storyline of the main character. Link has been the main character of The Legend of Zelda franchise since the series started, and Link has always been mute. Sometimes other characters would repeat a question or comment it was inferred Link said, but Link has never spoken in any of the Legend of Zelda games. That changed in Skyward Sword. Kind of. In certain situations, Link received dialogue options the player can choose from.
This might not sound like an exciting system that does anything new for games, but bear with me. Link has been silent the entire lifetime of the series. That means that players have developed their own ideas about how he speaks. Giving Link dialogue options allowed Nintendo to finally allow Link to “speak” without inhibiting the player’s interpretation of his “voice”—by which I mean both the literal sound of his voice and the figurative voice of his character made up of the words he uses.
My favorite moment in the game to illustrate this is a conversation Link has with the Sheikah warrior Impa. Impa found Zelda after she fell from the town of Skyloft and has been escorting her on her mission. When Link finally catches up to Zelda in his search for her, Impa tells him that Zelda doesn’t need him because he was late.
Later, the antagonist of the game manages to catch up to Impa and Zelda. He attacks them, but Link arrives to help. When Impa acknowledges his presence after he’s deflected an attack that could have killed her, Link is given three different dialogue options:
The option on the left reflects the persona of Link as the selfless hero that always has the right thing to say. The middle option portrays him as the sensible warrior with few words. And the right option? Well, that option is always, always full of sass. With this system, the player can create whatever voice they feel is correct for Link. To compare more of the effects of Link’s dialogue options in Skyward Sword, some specific ones have been pulled here, and the entire script of the game can be found here.
Chrono Cross is worthy of note when it comes to the subject of choice, because although it does things like offer the player a system to develop the main character’s voice however they see fit and also affect the progression of the story with their choices, the game also actively works against the player based on their choices. This is because the antagonist of Chrono Cross is Fate—not the concept, the individual.
When the key character Kid is poisoned, the player is given the choice to try and find an antidote even though the only known antidote comes from a species of hydra that have been extinct for years, or to write off the scenario as hopeless and continue with the game. The main character Serge is capable of switching between two different continuities of the world, so if the player chooses to hunt for an antidote, they can find it in the other world. If the character does this, however, they destroy the ecosystem of the swamp where they kill the last hydra, and the dwarves that live there are forced to vacate and search for a new home. They select Water Dragon Isle as their new home, and attack the fairies that live there.
It’s easy to see how your actions are linked to the dwarf attack on Water Dragon Isle with this series of choices. However, even if you decide to give up on finding a cure for Kid and don’t kill the hydra, the last hydra will still die and the dwarves will still attack the fairies.
What’s more, Kid survives her poisoning either way.
Some gamers might find the irrelevance of their decision frustrating, but it’s part of what I find so exhilarating about Chrono Cross. There are so many different ways to get through the game, and all of them lead to Serge and his party having different team members, different story segments, and different side quests. And yet, no matter what Serge chooses to do, his decisions do not play god to what happens in either his home world or the other world. He is not the only factor in how the plot proceeds. The story is bigger than him and his decisions. To me, that’s a very human experience, and not one that I think many gamers are used to being confronted with. Fate is the ruler of everything in Chrono Cross, and before Serge can make a decision to change the world, he must defeat Fate.
Whether our decisions are butterfly’s wings that stir up reactions across the galaxy or irrelevant expressions of our own will in an indifferent world guided by fate, they are still ours. Go choose your own adventure.
