When are you making lefse?
My daughter-in-law Molly had e-mailed. She was remembering the fun in having many gathered in the kitchen creating lefse last year.
Counting the three busy weekends before Christmas, I picked the week just before Christmas and hoped it would work.
Not only did we make lefse, flatbread was rolled out and baked that day too.
Pre-Christmas Sunday afternoon lefse making is a family tradition. Once I discovered making lefse was easier with two workers, a roller and a cooker, I’d enlisted the help of my children.
My sons made a game out of it, counting the number of lefse rounds each cooked, making sure in due time another brother took his turn - of course, it had to be fair. I was always the roller.
This tradition has evolved through the years. Although I can’t pick exactly when it started, I do know how.
My Grandma Voxland always made lefse for Christmas - it was devoured by the cousins. My mom was not a lefse maker. So I learned on my own, much later.
After reading an informative how-to newspaper story I found courage to try the difficult task.
“No Fail Lefse,” the story was titled. One needn’t have fancy equipment, but having a pastry cloth stretched around a board on which to roll the lefse dough very thin was important.
I took the large wooden drawing board once used for my design classes, and thumb-tacked a rectangular pastry cloth around it. Not having a real lefse griddle was not a problem either, one could use a pancake griddle right on the stove.
So this was my first set-up. The recipe didn’t involve a laborious potato peeling procedure. No, Betty Crocker came to the rescue, and supplied easy to cook potato buds used in the “no fail” recipe. A plain round rolling pin covered with a pastry sock would sufficiently roll out the dough.
Over time I have gradually acquired better equipment. A real lefse stick for lifting the rolled out lefse circles from the cloth to the griddle was my first purchase. Currently, my ensemble includes a Bethany lefse griddle, a special round board fitted with a pastry cloth, and a rolling pin carved with indentations - a real lefse rolling pin.
Not only have I outfitted myself, I’ve given my daughter and each of my daughter-in-laws their own grooved rolling pin, circle pastry board and lefse stick.
When our day arrived, both Jenna, my other daughter-in-law, and Molly came with their extra equipment, in case we needed more. We did. While the Molly and Jenna team created lefse - as Jenna rolled and Molly cooked, my granddaughter Kylie and I rolled out and baked flat bread.
Kylie is 4, but most of the time she seems older. She amazes me with her insights and determination to do things herself.
One night she had come over and asked for a carrot. After I peeled it for her, we chopped it up and put it in a bowl as she instructed. Then she wanted some broccoli, so I got a bunch out of the fridge. What else, raisins? Ok, and how about some of these sunflower seeds from the pantry cupboard? Yes, she likes raisins and sunflower seeds.
While I was chopping up the broccoli, she was dumping raisins and seeds into the bowl. I suggested one more thing, a stalk of celery? Yes, that was fine. So I chopped one up and she added this. Then a big glob of that white dressing from the refrigerator (mayonnaise.)
Kylie mixed and then she tasted and she liked what she’d created. So did Papa Dale when he came home for his supper. Another evening when she and her dad came visiting while her mom was away, we had to make Kylie’s salad once again.
Kylie is also an expert on making flat bread. We have done it together before.
She positioned her wood stool right beside the cupboard and floured down the round pastry board and rolling pin with her little fingers. She started rolling the first dough piece, but I finished it and lifted it with my extra lefse stick - the handmade one I’d purchased for someone, before realizing I’d already given them one.
She watched carefully and then rolled the next dough very round and very thin, but I lifted it to the pan and popped it into the oven.
I could tell the stick lifting would be next for her. She picked up the stick and as she tried to spear the edge. I explained one needed to hold it more flat to slip it underneath.
In my mind I can see her dad, Tyrel, carefully slipping the lefse stick under a paper thin lefse round, edging it across the expanse, and hoping none of the dough would stick to the cloth as he lifted it up.
Kylie lifted the draped flatbread round over to the cookie sheet.
Of course she could do it, so I also demonstrated rotating the stick to position the remaining half of the dough onto the cookie pan.
Truth be known, flatbread dough is a bit more forgiving than lefse dough, thus good practice for her.
Even a very determined 4 year old got bored with such a repetitious project after a while, and thus Grandma was eventually left to her flatbread project. Meanwhile Kylie moved to the whisking job on the increasingly thick piles of lefse rounds.
We use a pastry brush to gently whisk away excess flour off the cooked rounds.
Kylie likes to be busy and useful too. And she is. I find her very amazing. Of course, I am her grandmother.
After just over a couple hours of intense work, we were done. Jenna had simply continued rolling and Molly cooking until the last round was ready-to-eat lefse. They were amazing too.
And the guys - well they just kind of showed up briefly from time to time and did nothing much.
I think they were out climbing the tree in the backyard to light the star from the east and they sawed off the bottom of the Christmas tree Dale had purchased. They got it positioned in the stand too.
But mostly, they seemed to be watching that video of Logan’s fight once again.
This was a big deal at our house and one that I will tell you more about in a couple of weeks. My son Logan, a mixed martial arts cage fighter, fought his first fight for the UFC in San Diego on Dec. 13, four days before we made lefse.
Both his brothers had gone to California to watch him while the rest of us stayed home and waited.
Molly had called me to say the guys had arrived at the naval base where the fight event was held and were there in the crowd right now… Then, half an hour later she called again and said it was over and Logan had won! He, the underdog, had fought a former marine on a marine base in front of a crowd that booed him and he’d won.
It’s hard to be the mother of a cage fighter, nice to be a mother-in-law to two helpful women, and easy to be the grandmother of Kylie. I am proud of all their accomplishments.
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