Food From Home + Part Two

It's white, it's bland, it's Norwegian food. That means the staple of northern european cooking, potatoes! And what do you make out of potatoes if you're Norse? Bread.

And I'm not talking potatoe rolls or loaves of potatoe bread. Nope, I'm talking about the holiday food we in Minnesota call LEFSE.

It's pronounced, lef-sa, short 'e' sound, short 'a' sound. Just say it like the Swedish Chef and use your umlauts.

Making lefse is kinda labor intensive. At our house Mom would mix up the lefse dough and put it in the fridge overnight. The next day we'd get out the rolling pins and cooking iron and start. Mom whould take out a small piece of the lefse dough and roll it into a small ball. Then me, and my brother and sister whould take these bits of dough and roll them flat with a special grooved rolling pin. The trick was to try and keep the lefse a uniform thickness all the way around. Thick spots or very thin spots whouldn't cook properly. We'd also dust the rolling cloth with flour, to keep the lefse dough from sticking to the rolling surface and to the rolling pins. But you didn't want to add too much flour because the excess flour whould make the lefse tough and chewy. Once we'd rolled out the lefse to the proper size Dad whould use a special stick, a hand carved thin and tapered length of wood, to pick up the thin dough and place it on a smooth flat cooking iron. When brown spots start to appear on the surface of the dough the lefse was cooked.

Making lefse whould take a good afternoon to make, and I think it was more fun to make the lefse then to eat it. Cooked lefse looks like tortillas, but the taste is different and you don't eat 'em like tortillas, either. The way we eat a lefse is to open it up and lay it flat. Then spead butter on one side and sprinkle some sugar over it to taste. (Personally, I don't like to add sugar, but that's just me.) Fold the lefse over and roll it up and eat. Simple really.

Hmmm-mmm! Lefse goodness!