Where there's only one way to fry

Menorahs aren't so easy to come by here but with a bag full of votive candles I made do for Hanukkah this year.  After stumbling through an explanation of the miracle of lights in a combination of hand gestures and faltering Spanish (not too many vocab drills out there on biblical keywords), my roommate managed to gather that "Jewish Christmas" has something to do with oil.  When I told her the festive foods revolve around frying, she was all for hosting a latke party.

I put Yolanda to work prepping homemade applesauce and filling bowls with Yogur Griego (subbed in for sour cream) while I started on the potato pancakes.  I wanted to give her the full Hanukkah experience so I took her through the grating, the squeezing and the mixing.  When I looked over and saw she was pressing on valiantly with the onions despite the burning tears in her eyes I decided not to tell her that I actually think latkes made from Manischewitz box mix taste better than homemade.

If it was going to be a party we were going to need dessert, and the obvious choice was traditional Hanukkah Sufganiyot-doughnuts filled with jam and rolled in sugar.  After dinner I found some forgotten sunflower oil in the back of the cupboard, poured it into a big pot and starting cutting out circles of dough that had been rising on the counter all evening.

Yolanda came in to wash a stack of plates, saw the empty bottle and was physically taken aback. In the same endearing way she responds (as if the English language has personally betrayed her) when I try to explain that despite her years of education to the contrary, we don't actually say things like "queue" or "rubbish" in the USA, she threw up her hands and shook her head, dumbfounded.

With an unintentionally melodramatic flourish she knelt down to haul out the 5 kilo plastic jug of extra virgin olive oil her father replenishes when she visits home and set it down in front of me.  The notion that I, or anyone else for that matter, would use oil from sunflowers rather than olives to fry with was completely baffling to her ("it's very strange to see this, do you know?!") but I was able to talk her down with the promise that I would never prepare doughnuts in such an heretical fat again.

A couple weeks later we went to see her relatives in Granada for the holidays, and just like coming downstairs to see your parents showing embarrassing baby pictures to your middle-school boyfriend, I realized she was recounting the episode to the entire table while I was getting more napkins from the kitchen.  They all had a good laugh over my preposterous frying habits and then her dad leaned over and give me a good-natured pat on the back, just glad to see that I had been converted.