Looking forward to lefse

Today I'm cooking up some mashed potatoes in anticipation of our New Year's Day tradition of five or six years running: making lefse.

Lefse is a Norwegian flatbread made with both flour and cooked potatoes, baked (not fried in oil) with a griddle or frying pan, rather than in an oven, until it gets brown spots on it. It's delicious spread with butter and sprinkled with sugar, the traditional serving method in our family.  I've also enjoyed it wrapped around a piece of fish, spread with peanut butter and jelly, or sprinkled with cinnamon added to the sugar.

Grandma Evert's recipe specifically calls for leftover mashed potatoes, making lefse baking a great activity on the day after a holiday meal. Fresh and hot mashed potatoes would be too sticky to make lefse dough. Usually at our family gatherings the potatoes are passed through a ricer and may not be mixed with butter and cream, but the amounts of oil and flour in the family recipe can be adjusted to account for additional fat in the potatoes.

I've never taken pictures of my husband and me making lefse because we are both too covered in flour and busy watching pans on the stove to touch the camera. We've got an efficient system: I make the dough and roll out all the little dough balls, and my husband takes care of knowing when to flip the lefse in the four pans we have going at once. We don't have the traditional flat flipping stick (according to lore I was told as a child, the stick should be blessed by a troll), but a spatula works just fine for our small rounds. If we make a double batch, we have enough lefse to share with friends and neighbors.

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All I want this week is a pot of stew

It's all about stew and soup this week at our house, with seaweed soup early in the week followed by red lentil and vegetable stew that we took to friends for a shared dinner Wednesday, then spinach and lentil soup the next day, and finally, Friday night's cold-weather vegetable stew with spicy sausage. Since I have a head cold that started really bothering me on Thursday, I'm glad there are lots of soupy leftovers today.

Friday night special: Cold-weather vegetable stew with spicy sausage
serves 4 to 6

2 Tbsp olive oil
1 onion, chopped
1 lb hot Italian turkey sausage (bulk sausage, not in casings)
2 celery ribs, sliced
3 carrots, sliced
2 parsnips, sliced
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 lb white mushrooms, halved
1 tsp Penzey's Spices Adobo seasoning (www.penzeys.com) or 1/4 tsp each of Mexican oregano, fresh ground pepper, cumin and cayenne pepper
3 to 4 cups chicken stock (more if you like it more soupy, less if you like thick stew)
flesh of 1 roasted pie pumpkin (see note)
salt to taste

Saute onion in a large soup pot in olive oil until translucent, then add sausage and break up into small pieces while it browns. When sausage is almost done, add celery, carrots, parsnips and garlic and stir occasionally until vegetables are starting to cook. Add mushrooms and keep stirring and cooking until some liquid appears at the bottom of the pot. Pour in stock and seasonings. When stock comes to a boil, turn down to a simmer and cook the vegetables about 10 minutes. Add in the pumpkin flesh, bring to a boil and simmer again for 20 minutes. Add salt if you wish and served piping hot.

Note: to roast a pie pumpkin, place the entire pumpkin on a baking pan in a 375 degree oven and bake one hour. Cut pumpkin in half, scoop out seeds and discard, then scoop out the cooked flesh.

Beware, this stew is spicy, and the cayenne pepper will need to be skipped if you can't handle a lot of spice. You may even have to mix mild and spicy sausages, because the sausage itself has a good spice kick. I like to eat extra spicy foods when I have a head cold because they encourage my nose to run.

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This season's very special dinner experiment

In this time of brisk late-fall winds and precipitation that may decide to be snow or rain or a little of both, the chilly journey home from work can be forgotten over a plate of hot food.

Tonight I played around with using spaghetti squash like pasta to hold a sauce. That sauce was today's special experiment, a low-fat, "just had to sneak in another vegetable" sausage gravy. The side dish was seasoned oven-roasted potato wedges.

To prepare spaghetti squash (I had a pretty small one), I put the whole, uncut squash in a baking pan in a 400 degree (Fahrenheit) oven and baked it for a little under an hour. While the squash was baking, I prepared the rest of the meal. For a larger squash, it may be better to cut it in half before roasting. I removed the seeds when the squash was done and scooped out stringy squash onto plates, topping it with...

Sausage Gravy with Just One More Vegetable
4 servings

2 Tbsp butter or margarine
4 or 5 celery stalks, chopped (other vegetables could be substituted, like carrots or turnip bits or chopped fennel)
one pound hot and spicy Italian turkey sausage (not the kind in casings, but bulk sausage)
2 cloves garlic, sliced thinly
2 Tbsp flour
1 to 2 cups milk (I used unsweetened soy milk)
fresh ground black pepper to taste

Heat butter/margarine in a large nonstick skillet, add vegetable and cook until nearly tender. Add garlic and sausage, breaking sausage into small bits as it cooks. When sausage is cooked through, sprinkle with flour and stir over the heat a few minutes. The flour will coat the sausage and vegetable. Add milk in small amounts, stirring, until it simmers and thickens to the desired consistency. Use more milk for thinner gravy. Add pepper to taste.

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The big pot of vegetable beef soup

Sorry for the long hiatus. When I started volunteering for a weekly show on my local college radio station, the blogs started suffering accordingly. This recipe has been kicking around in draft for a long time, so it's about time I get it finalized and out there for folks to read.

I was asked to do something soup-like with about three pounds of beef leftovers at work, and this is what I created.


Vegetable beef soup with potatoes and fresh herbs

1/4 cup olive oil
4 large onions, chopped
2 to 3 cups diced celery
6 carrots, sliced or diced
6 medium-sized zucchinis, quartered and sliced (or cubed)
1/4 cup chopped fresh rosemary
1 to 2 tsp dried thyme
about 4 pounds potatoes, diced
about 3 pounds beef leftovers: brisket, roast beef
6 quarts beef broth
1/2 cup chopped parsley
salt and pepper to taste

Sweat the carrots, onions and celery in olive oil until tender. Add other vegetables, broth, herbs (except parsley) and beef bits and bring to boil. Simmer until potatoes are tender and flavors have blended, add parsley and season to taste. Best when served one day after cooking.

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