G: Nothing exotic—you’re already working with the classic steak + green pepper + onion combination. The main kebab-specific issue is getting three ingredients with different cooking speeds to finish together.

A few things worth remembering before you start:

• Cut the steak fairly uniformly, roughly 1–1¼-inch cubes. Much smaller and it can overcook before the vegetables get good.
• Cut the pepper and onion surprisingly large. Pepper pieces around 1–1½ inches; onion in thick wedges/chunks with 2–3 layers still attached. Tiny onion pieces tend to burn or fall apart.
• Don’t pack the skewer tightly. Leave just a little breathing room between pieces. If everything is compressed into one solid kebab-log, the touching surfaces steam rather than brown.
• If using wooden skewers, soak them first—about 20–30 minutes is plenty for practical purposes. Metal skewers obviously skip this.
• Dry the steak before seasoning/marinating. Surface water works against browning.
• A little oil on the vegetables is useful. Peppers and especially onions benefit from a thin coating so they blister rather than simply dry out.
• Salt timing: either salt immediately before grilling or sufficiently ahead of time—roughly 40+ minutes. The awkward interval is salting 10–20 minutes beforehand, when salt has drawn moisture to the surface but it hasn't had time to work its way back in.
• If you're marinating the beef, you don't need a long acidic marinade for ordinary kebab steak. Something like oil + Worcestershire/soy + garlic + black pepper works well. If you use substantial lime/lemon/vinegar, a few hours is plenty; overnight acid can make the exterior texture weird.
• Keep raw-beef marinade away from your finishing sauce. If you want to brush something on at the end, reserve some before the raw meat goes into it.

One thing I might change

If you care about getting the steak really nicely browned while keeping it medium-rare/medium, consider separate skewers for steak and vegetables. It's less picturesque, but much easier to cook correctly. Onion and green pepper generally want more grill time than 1-inch steak cubes do. You can start the vegetable skewers several minutes earlier, then put the beef on.

If you want the traditional alternating steak–pepper–onion–steak kebab, that absolutely works; just keep the vegetables fairly chunky and run the grill hot, turning every couple of minutes rather than leaving one side over the fire forever.

For beef cubes, I'd pull them around 125–130°F for medium-rare or 135°F-ish for medium, allowing a little carryover. With kebabs, an instant-read thermometer inserted sideways into one of the fattest cubes works much better than trying to stab downward through it.

And since you have green pepper and onion already, mushrooms are the one obvious third vegetable I'd add if you happen to have them. They fit the flavor profile and handle kebab grilling extremely well.

If you tell me what seasonings/sauces you've got handy, I can give you a very quick marinade specifically for the steak + green pepper + onion combination.

G: Yep. For simple steak–green pepper–onion kebabs alongside potato pancakes, you've basically got it. There are just a handful of small kebab-specific things I'd keep in mind:

• Oil the vegetables lightly, not the beef heavily. Tossing the pepper/onion with just enough oil to make them glossy helps tremendously. The steak needs little or none unless it's extremely lean.
• Salt the steak right as it goes on. I'd also salt the vegetables lightly at that point. Black pepper on everything is plenty if you want this deliberately simple.
• Keep the onion in multi-layer chunks. Two or three layers together are much less likely to char into oblivion or fall off the skewer.
• Don't cram the pieces together. They can touch, but don't compress them. You want hot air/flame reaching the edges.
• Make the steak pieces a little larger than you instinctively might. About 1–1¼ inches gives you enough time to brown the outside without immediately cooking the center through.
• Pay attention to skewer geometry. This is the easily forgotten one: try to make each piece sit relatively flat and don't leave a giant pepper or onion chunk projecting below everything else. Otherwise that one vegetable becomes the "foot" holding the steak away from the grate.
• Turn the whole kebab by faces rather than constantly rolling it. Give one side time to brown, quarter-turn, repeat. With square-ish steak chunks, you can basically treat it as four little grilling surfaces.
• Watch the onion more than the pepper. A little blackening on either is good, but exposed onion edges can go from browned to carbonized fairly abruptly.

Since you're eating these with potato pancakes, I actually wouldn't add anything else. Salt, pepper, grilled beef, charred green pepper and sweetened/charred onion give you a fairly clean savory counterpoint to the pancakes rather than turning the kebab into another heavily seasoned component.

One tiny thing before you light everything up: if they're wooden skewers and you haven't soaked them, put them in water now while the grill heats. If they're metal, you're ready to go.

G: Yes—your instinct about the awkwardness is basically why the normal table-eating method is to slide the food off the skewer onto the plate first, especially with metal skewers.

The skewer is primarily a cooking and serving device, not necessarily an eating utensil. At the table, hold the skewer by its handle/end over your plate, use a fork to brace the first piece, and pull the skewer backward through the food. Everything slides off onto the plate, and then you eat normally with fork and knife.

Eating directly off the skewer is certainly done, especially with street-food-style kebabs, but there are practical disadvantages with the long metal kind you're using: the skewer can still be hot, the point is potentially hazardous, and biting/pulling pieces off can suddenly release one and send the remaining food or skewer somewhere unfortunate.

There's also a useful distinction hidden by English "kebab." In a lot of cuisines, kebab refers broadly to grilled/roasted meat preparations; the particular thing we're making—chunks threaded on a skewer—is more specifically shish kebab (from Turkish şiş, "skewer"). The stick is fundamentally there because it's a wonderfully convenient way to grill a bunch of little pieces, not because somebody decided steak needed to be eaten from a tiny sword.

So for tonight: grill on metal → put skewer over plate → fork against the food → withdraw skewer → eat steak, pepper, and onion from the plate. Much less likely to turn dinner into an ophthalmology appointment.

G: Exactly. If the store has already done the "turn perfectly good steak into little cubes" step for you, you might as well take the invitation. 😄

And I assume "already wedding" is voice transcription mangling something like "already ready" or "already [cut]". Either way, I got the intended meaning.

You're set: lightly oiled vegetables, salt just before grilling, don't crowd the skewers, and slide everything onto the plate afterward. Enjoy the kebabs and potato pancakes.

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G: I found enough overlap to pin this down pretty confidently. Your mom’s “potato + egg + onion + salt in the blender” is a real old-school style, but the biggest variable is whether she also used any flour/matzo meal—or relied entirely on the potatoes’ starch.

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G: For 2 lb 6 oz peeled potato (38 oz / about 1.08 kg), and specifically trying to reproduce the smooth blender-style potato pancake your mom described rather than shredded latkes, I’d use:

• 2 large eggs
• 1 medium onion, roughly 6–8 oz before trimming
• 1¼ teaspoons table salt to start
• Your 38 oz peeled potatoes, cut into chunks small enough for the blender
• Neutral oil for frying

That lands right in the middle of several published formulas. Blender recipes commonly use about 2 eggs per ~3 cups cubed potato, while more conventional recipes cluster around roughly 1 egg per pound to pound-and-a-half of potato; for your 2⅜ pounds, two eggs is a very sensible starting point. citeturn231685search0turn231685search1turn838396search1 Onion ratios vary more wildly, but about one medium onion for two-ish pounds is very common. citeturn838396search0turn231685search4

The interesting part is flour. A lot of blender recipes add 2–3 tablespoons of flour at roughly this scale, because pureeing the potato releases a lot of water and destroys the shredded structure that ordinarily helps a latke hold together. citeturn231685search0turn231685search1 But since your mom specifically remembered potato, egg, onion and salt, I would not add flour automatically. Potato starch can absolutely provide enough binding, especially in a finely blended pancake.

How I'd actually blend this batch

Don't try to dump all 2⅜ pounds of potato into a blender at once. Put in the 2 eggs + onion + salt first, then perhaps ¼ of the potato, and blend that smooth enough to establish liquid circulation. Then add the remaining potato in portions, pulsing, just until everything is finely ground. One old blender-pancake method does essentially exactly this: make a smooth base with the egg/onion and some potato, then process the rest more briefly. citeturn231685search0

You are aiming for something like thick, pourable oatmeal/batter, not potato soup. Over-blending can make raw potato increasingly watery.

Then do one test pancake before changing anything. That's particularly useful here because your mom's remembered recipe may genuinely have no flour:

If it spreads into a puddle or breaks when you flip it, stir 1 tablespoon flour into the batch and test again. If necessary, go to 2 tablespoons total. I wouldn't jump straight to ¼ cup unless the batter is obviously extremely wet.

For frying, put roughly ¼ inch of neutral oil in the pan and get it properly hot before the batter goes in. Published potato-pancake recipes consistently depend on hot oil for setting the outside quickly; batches around this size usually cook about 2–3 minutes per side, depending on thickness. citeturn838396search0turn231685search4

And one useful correction to something we were just discussing with the kebabs: don't hold off on the salt here. In the potato-pancake batter, the salt belongs in the mixture. Since you're blending and frying immediately, the moisture it draws out isn't a problem in the same sense as surface moisture on steak.

So the number I'd physically put on the counter right now is:

38 oz potato + 2 eggs + 1 medium onion + 1¼ tsp table salt.

Blend, fry one sacrificial test pancake, and only introduce flour if that first one tells you your mom's minimalist version needs a little help. memcite