Bubbe Wendy’s Hanukkah Latkes (Fancy Wendy’s Hash Browns)
by Erik of Fancy Fast Food, with assistance from Lilit Marcus of Jewcy and Save The Assistants

Hey everybody, it’s Hanukkah! It’s Chanuka! No matter how you spell it, it’s time for the Jewish festival of lights — eight crazy nights of dreidels gone wild, a time when latkes are as abundant as old yentas around a mahjongg table. But you don’t need to be Jewish to partake in Hanukkah traditions, particularly the gastronomic treat of latkes (or lattkes). No matter how you spell it, “latkes” is Yiddish for fried pancakes, typically of the potato variety — making it oddly similar to McDonald’s hash browns. However, Bubbe Wendy has guilted us into using her Fancy Fast Food recipe (“If you just want to use McDonald’s hash browns, then I guess that’s fine by me…”), so here goes. Oy…

Ingredients (from Wendy’s):

• 8 orders of hash browns (for the eight nights of Hannukah)
• 2 baked potatoes (with packets of sour cream and “Buttery-Best Spread”)
• 2 orders of mandarin oranges
• 1 small soft drink
• 1 bottle of water
• packets of Sweet & Sour Sauce
• packets of sugar
• packets of salt and pepper
• a pinch of Jewish guilt (may be substituted with Catholic guilt)
• organic chives (for garnish and a touch of irony)

Latkes are traditionally served with apple sauce or sour cream. We already have the latter, so we’re going to have to make the apple sauce. Unfortunately, Wendy’s sells no apple products whatsoever, so we’ll have to get creative.

What are apples? They are a kind of fruit that are sometimes sweet, sometimes sour, and so naturally we will start with Sweet & Sour Sauce. To add a fruity pulp to it, we’ll add the mandarin oranges — but that’s fine; Bubbe Wendy moved down to Boca.

Put the manadrin oranges in a food processor and purée them, then strain out the extraneous juice. Mix this pulp in a bowl with the Sweet & Sour Sauce. The color is a bit intense to look like real apple sauce, so scoop out some baked potato (minus any chives) and mix it in — the French call potatoes “pommes de terre” (apples of earth) so we’ll go with it. Mush and whisk it all until it sort of looks like apple sauce; add sugar until it’s as sweet.

Next, the latkes themselves. Take all the mini hash brown nuggets and mush them with your hands. Touching them, you’ll realize they are all too greasy for things to stick together, so we’ll need to make a batter to work as a binding agent.

Put one baked potato, minus the skin, into a food processor and add about a quarter cup of water. Hit purée and voilà: batter! Add this potato batter to your pile of hash browns and mix thoroughly in a bowl. Add salt and pepper as desired.

In a large non-stick skillet, melt a few packets of Wendy’s “Buttery-Best Spread;” there’s enough oil in it for a fry-up. Slice the top of your beverage’s paper cup and use it as a guide when forming the batter into pancakes in the skillet. Fry each evenly on both sides until it becomes crispy and golden brown. Argue with Bubbe Wendy that they do in fact, resemble McDonald’s hash browns now — but let her win the argument; she’ll try and make you feel guilty for never calling her anyway.

You are ready to serve the Hannukah latkes, but wait! You can use your fancy kitchen tools in continued preparation for the holiday: use a fondue fork to clean out the old waxy build-up in your menorah; use a kitchen torch to light the new candles.

Garnish the latkes with organic chives (for that extra touch of irony), and then have a Happy Hannukah, courtesy of Bubbe Wendy and Fancy Fast Food! Now spin those dreidels until we figure out what we’re going to do for Christmas…

If you are viewing this recipe in an aggregator (like tumblr’s Dashboard), or as a reblogged post, please check out the real website at FancyFastFood.com.

Seared Pollock Cake with Southwest Ramalan Sauce (Fancy Filet-O-Fish)
by Devon Knight and Jason Isch of Cornerstore Restaurateur

Since BurgerBusiness and Eat Me Daily broke the news about McDonald’s Portugal having a similar “fancy” promo contest — as well as McDonald’s Australia (which FFF creator Erik Trinidad recently brought up in a segment on Australia’s Weekend Today morning show) — we here at Fancy Fast Food have continued to encourage our readers to submit their own recipes and photos of fast food fancifications. Here’s the latest contribution from guest chefs Devon Knight and Jason Isch of Cornerstore Restaurateur, in their words:

Ingredients:

• 1 Filet-O-Fish sandwich
• 1 Premium Southwest Salad (with packet of Newman’s Own Southwest Restaurant Dressing)
• 1 medium soft drink
• packets of salt and pepper

Carefully free that little “Alaskan Pollock and/or Hoki” (from Wikipedia) fish filet from its buns. Remove all tartar sauce from the fish and buns, and set it aside. Toast the top half of the bun and set that aside.

Carefully cut the breading off of the fish — but don’t throw the breading out, since we’re going to use it later. Take some time to absorb the fact that yes, McDonald’s does indeed use real fish for their Filet-O-Fish. After star-gazing a while at your quaint fish square, delicately flake the fish apart and place it in a bowl.

Grab that salad and get to dissecting; we’re going to take out the tomatoes, scallions, and a small amount of corn and throw them in the bowl with the flaked fish. GO GREEN! Do yourself a favor and eat some of those greens left behind by your salad dissection.

Take your warm, toned, toasted bun and grind it up in a food processor until it is the consistency of, well, bread crumbs (funny how that works out). Place the bread crumbs in the fish bowl along with a packet of salt and about a half a packet of pepper. Mix all the ingredients in the bowl until it is a sticky, fishy goop. Cut off the bottom of your (empty) soda cup to form a mold for the fish cake, and then put your goop in to mold it.

Take your packet of Southwest salad dressing and strain it into a frying pan over low heat; we want to warm it, not cook it. Take the discarded fish breading and rub it on the bottom of a separate frying pan. The grease from the breading will give you just enough oily coating to sear the fish cake — yummy. Heat the pan until grease is gently smoking, then flip the cake mold over the hot pan and sear the fish cake on both sides.

Finally, the plating: pour the warm salad dressing into a dish and daintily place your fish cake on top. Garnish your little fish puck with some of the contents of your salad.

If you are viewing this recipe in an aggregator (like tumblr’s Dashboard), or as a reblogged post, please check out the real website at FancyFastFood.com.

Franksgiving Dinner (Fancy Nathan’s, Take Two) by Erik of Fancy Fast Food (using some of his techniques as featured in the November 2009 Wired article by Erica Westly)

Ingredients:

• 1 Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog (with chili)
• 1 Corn Dog on a Stick
• 1 order of Crinkle-Cut French Fries
• 1 small fruit punch
• organic chives (for garnish and a touch of irony)

This Thanksgiving, we could have easily gone to Boston Market for a quick, traditional American Thanksgiving meal, but where’s the fun in that?

To get started, use a kitchen torch to sear one side of your corn dog so that it has a few burn marks — not too much, just enough to give the exterior an appearance of being roasted. Then flip the corn dog over and cut an incision so that you can extract about two-thirds of the interior hot dog. With that solid mass removed, you can easily mold the remaining cornbread batter into a shape that resembles that of a turkey leg.

Next, remove the hot dog from its bun, leaving the chili. Scoop the chili into a skillet, and then chop the remaining bun into small pieces. Mix the bun pieces in with the chili — crushing the beans in the process — until it’s blended and looks like stuffing. To make the mashed potatoes, simply stick some fries in a food processor and blend. (Nathan’s fries are inherently moist, so there’s no need to add water.)

To make some faux cranberry sauce, bring the fruit punch to a boil in a non-stick pan until it’s reduced down to a thick red syrup. Toss in some bread pieces to soak up the syrup and make a chunky paste of fruity flavor.

Finally, the plating: place your “turkey leg” and all the sides on a welcoming round plate; garnish the potatoes with organic chives for that extra touch of irony. Now give thanks, and have a Happy Franksgiving!

If you are viewing this recipe in an aggregator (like tumblr’s Dashboard), or as a reblogged post, please check out the real website at FancyFastFood.com.