Last night Danny, Dave and I had plans to make latkes, so after a quick trip to the grocery store for supplies, we headed back to my apartment for some serious potato action. Everybody loves eating latkes, but it’s easy to forget that making latkes usually means grating your knuckles in with the potatoes, and later on setting a medium to large grease fire. That the smoke alarm will go off often enough to warrant being set outside on the porch is, at least in my experience, a given.

To my knowledge, this is the first year of my life that no one shed any blood over the latkes I ate, which is very exciting. There was small fire at one point, but we had gone over grease fire protocol before we started frying, so we were able to contain it without too much trouble. The smoke, though, was another issue entirely. Maybe it’s because most of the windows in my apartment are painted shut, or maybe we just had poor ventilation, but it was pretty intense. It didn’t help that the light in my kitchen has been acting strangely, and was only giving off this weird dim glow. A dark smoky room with greasy people running around in a slight panic—it was like a cheap sad little dance club. The latkes, though, came out beautifully, especially our sweet potato attempts with ginger. By the time we had eaten our fill the kitchen was less sketchy, but I left the door to the porch open for a few hours to try to get the ‘eau de charred potatoes” out.

After we had partaken I realized I’d left my candles at the party the night before, so we went back to Danny’s house to pick them up, at which point Danny had a brilliant idea: a beer bottle chanukiah. Using some packing tape, 8 bottles of Rolling Rock and 1 bottle of Stella for the Shamash, we came up with a thing of beauty. When I went home and described it to my roommate and her friends they insisted we make our own, so within an hour I had built and lit two beer bottle chanukiot. I have never been more hipster.

The only problem with last night’s fun is that this morning when I woke up the whole apartment still smelled like latkes. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I’m a bit concerned about how long this will last…