One scene involving my favorite character in filmmaker Nancy Meyers’ 2007 rom com “The Holiday” features a Hanukkah dinner, so I decided to make latkes for this pairing.

This recipe make 8 “servings”/latkes and is gluten-free and dairy-free. You could easily swap with an egg replacer to make it vegan.

Ingredients
16 ounces frozen shredded potatoes or hash browns, thawed
4 green onions, sliced (omit if there are onions in your potato bags already)
2 eggs
2 tablespoons unseasoned gluten-free bread crumbs
1 teaspoon salt
0.25 teaspoons black pepper
1 cup canola or olive oil

For Serving (optional)
dairy-free or vegan sour cream
chopped chives
applesauce

Instructions
Make sure you thaw your potatoes out before you prep them.

Slice the onions lengthwise so they’re in strips that are similarly sized to the potatoes. Then mix them with the potatoes.

Use paper towels to remove as much moisture as possible from the potatoes and onions.

Put the potatoes and onions in a bowl and mix them with the egg, bread crumbs, salt and pepper.

Heat the oil in a pan.

Scoop about half a cup of potato mixture out and form it into a pancake.

Fry it in the pan for about 5 minutes on each side or until it’s golden brown.

Place them on a paper towel to blot the grease.

Repeat until you make all eight latkes.

Serve with dairy-free sour cream and applesauce!

The Easy Route
Buy some frozen latkes to heat up or find a local restaurant to order some latkes to go.

One easy step to make homemade latkes a little easier is getting dried chives for the latke mixture and/or the topping.

The Pairing
“The Holiday” is one of my all-time favorite romantic comedies. I’ve seen it dozens of times and can pretty much quote it word for word.

Kate Winslet is what drew me to the movie, the first time seeing her play a modern British woman after a long series of period pieces and a turn as a modern American in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” one of my all-time favorite movies.

This movie is based on the premise that Iris (Winslet), a heartbroken English journalist, and Amanda (Cameron Diaz), an American movie trailer editor who just went through a bad breakup, swap homes for Christmas via a website in a very last-minute, impulsive mutual decision.

While Iris revels in the splendor of Amanda’s Los Angeles mansion, Amanda struggles to enjoy herself in Iris’s small English cottage.

That is, until Amanda’s brother, Graham (Jude Law), drunkenly comes knocking on the cottage door one night.

Meanwhile, back in L.A., Iris befriends a composer, Miles (Jack Black), and is still struggling to get over her ex, Jasper (Rufus Sewell), who won’t stop texting and calling even though she told him to do that.

It is fun to see Black play against type as one of the leading men in a rom com (the scene in Blockbuster is absolutely incredible), but Winslet’s best scene partner is the one and only Eli Wallach. He plays one of Amanda’s neighbors, Arthur, a retired screenwriter who worked during Tinseltown’s glory days.

There are talks of meet cutes, Cary Grant, gumption, leading ladies and Hollywood history in general. I perk up whenever Arthur comes on screen.

I love this movie so much, and the Winslet-Wallach scenes are the main reason why. I saw it two or three times when it came out in theaters and watched it so much when I got it on DVD that my roommates teased me about it.

I still watch it about once a year and highly recommend adding it to your holiday movie rotation.

If you decide to make latkes and/or watch “The Holiday,” let us know! Tag us in your Instagram posts & stories, tweets or TikTok videos: @veg_out_recipes