My father made lefse.

He’d make huge batches at Christmas so that he could share with our Scandinavian friends in the area.

He didn’t have a commercial facility…just a flat stick, a griddle, a cloth to roll the lefse out on, and a bunch of flour and potatoes.

It was a big deal for some of these families to get some lefse if they lived down south.

You can get chowchow…but if you stop at a roadside stand and ask for some lefse, they usually look at you kind of funny.

Watching this video, you wouldn’t believe that lefse could inspire such excitement.

These Scandinavians have an understated way about them a lot of the time…excitement is hard to read a lot of times.

My father’s lefse was really good lefse…all the Norwegians I know who had a chance to taste it thought so.  It inspired a lot of Scandinavian overstatement and excitement like, “This is good lefse that your father makes.”

No one ever said, “That lefse? Uff da.”

I watched him make it for years…mixing up the potatoes, flour…and I think a little salt…butter?sugar? I can’t remember….not too dry, not too moist…rolling it out on the cloth and then picking it up with the flat stick so he could transfer it to the griddle.

This was a long time before the internet..so I think he learned how to make it from his mother.

I watched him, but I think that it would take a while to get up to speed with any of my attempts.  I should give it a shot…I don’t know that anybody in the immediate family is messing with making lefse.  I bet they’d enjoy eating some again.

Dad had a very calm and precise way of doing things…so his lefse was pretty consistent.

When he made a batch, he knew what to expect.

People knew it was going to be good.

I slept in this morning…6:30 instead of my usual 5:00…so I’m feeling more tired than wired today.  Something about “over sleeping” makes me groggy. I’m groggy so I needed to write about something calm…like a Norwegian potato “bread” called lefse.

I should be eating a piece of lefse…buttered and sprinkled with sugar, rolled up like a Nordic burrito…I should be eating a big piece of lefse and looking out over a fjord somewhere in Norway. That would be an interesting thing to wake up to with my family.

We need to get Sparrow her passport…and then?  Who knows where we might end up.

Lefse and a fjord….here we come.

Here’s another YouTube video I found.  A different feel to this one…dreadlocked lefse making with a rock soundtrack is different than a tour of Northern Minnesota “Scandinavia-ville”.