Today is Friday, November 8, 2013. My stats today: 10 minutes of yoga, 10 minutes of lifting weights and 45 minutes of walking = 2.5 miles for a November total 16.2 miles. My weight was 166.2 pounds.
QUOTE today from Garrison Keillor: "It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars."
My THOUGHTS today: My first thought is I'm happy Ruth Ann and I got the lefse made for Christmas. Wednesday afternoon Ruth Ann sent me to Walmart to buy all the ingredients we need to make lefse, the traditional Norwegian potato bread we make every year at Christmas. The list included two boxes of Betty Crocker potato buds, a pint of half and half, Gold Medal flour, sugar, and Parkay margarine. Ruth Ann mixed up the ingredients Wednesday afternoon, let it cool outside for a couple of hours and then put it in the fridge overnight. Yesterday morning we got out our round lefse grill (24" diameter), the wooden roller, cloth sleeves to put on the roller, the 19" (diameter) round board she rolls the lefse balls on to flatten them, and a folded sheet we put on the table for me to tuck the hot lefse pieces into when I take them off the grill. At 9 AM we started making the lefse. By noon we had made 53 pieces of lefse. Ruth Ann takes an ice cream scoop of the lefse mixture, puts the scoop on her round board that is covered with a cloth, then sprinkles some flour on the cloth so when she rolls out the ball it will not stick to the roller or the cloth. She rolls the ball out until it is flat at about 12-14 inch diameter, then rolls up the piece on the stick, and unrolls it on the 500 degree grill. Then I take over: she hands me the stick, for about 15 seconds I will brown it on one side, flip it over to brown it on the other side for another 10-15 seconds and then I pick it up with the stick and take it to the folded sheet on the kitchen table. I fold it twice and tuck it under about three layers of the sheet. That way it cools very slowly which is what you want to do with lefse - that keeps it nice and soft. I put four lefse on top of each other and then start another pile. When we got done at noon we had 13 piles and one extra. Working together we can make 20 lefse an hour.
Ruth Ann and I have eaten lefse every year at Christmas since we were toddlers. We are both 100% Norwegian and eating lefse is one of the customs our grandparents and great-grandparents brought from Norway in the latter half of the 1800s.
How do we eat lefse? First of all it looks like a pizza crust. We usually cut the pieces in half or quarters. I grew up eating it with real butter and sprinkling brown sugar on it. Ruth Ann's family was more for plain sugar. Some Norwegians lay it on their plate and load it up with potatoes, gravy and lutefisk (they pour melted butter and salt and pepper on the lutefisk) - then fold it up and eat it like a burrito.
What is lutefisk? That is another story. But I can assure you more people like lefse than lutefisk.
I'm happy we got it done yesterday. Now we have enough for some friends we give to every year. Also, Brad and Alexandra are coming for Thanksgiving so we can treat them. Brad absolutely loves it.
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