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.