Celeriac Pancakes

When vacation comes around there is a part of me that becomes more domesticated.  I start cooking more, scrap booking, being all crafty and, this break, even knitting.  I decide to try things that I may have been wanting to try , and sometimes it turns out OK, or I bomb miserably.  This is a case where I bombed miserably. 

For weeks at the farmers market I have been looking at the celeriac (celery root) and thinking I should make celeriac pancakes (kind of like latkes).  I decided to pick up a few celeriac roots and set aside a morning to make them.  This is where I should include the part about not really reading the recipe before I set out on this adventure.  Had I done that, I would have realized just how time consuming this venture was going to be. 

Once vacation started, Little Man and I slept in and then happily awoke to make our breakfast and set out for the adventures of the day; or so we thought.  Once Little Man realized the first task was to use the cheese grater on the potatoes and celeriac, he quickly bailed on me and headed to his room to hang out with his Lego's.  He has used the cheese grater before and knows he does not like it.  About halfway though the recipe, I decided to halve the recipe, since the grating was taking so long and an hour after starting, I had my onions chopped, potatoes and celeriac grated and was ready to begin cooking.  That is when I read the next direction... let sit in cheese cloth draining for 45 minutes.  Of course I wanted none of this at this point.  I was hungry and was determined to eat soon! What is a girl to do?  Squeezes the things out by hand right?  Bad idea by the way.  We'll talk about that in a few minutes.

When I finally had everything in the bowl and ready to cook (an hour and a half after starting), I scooped everything into the frying pan.  Here is where things got interesting.  You see, all the excess liquid made it really hard to make these things crispy.  They were a little slimy, and I didn't want to eat them, let along feed them to my child.  This of course is when Little Man came bounding out of his room , ready to eat.  I gave him a taste and we quickly decided that toast would be a better option.  So much for the domestic goddess.