Can we EVER get the Lefse made?

I think most of you know "lefse"... if not, I've included a handy little photo.

It's been a family tradition for as many years as we can trace our family (at least back to 1890's). For my brothers and I, the connect is my Grandma Alice. In the years I knew her, she made lefse completely from scratch in her tiny little cottage house on the farm. I don't have a lot of memories of Grandma cooking anything... but lefse is kind of memorable because it's such a MESS!

Grandma was a pro, for sure. I still don't think my lefse is as good as hers. But I guess she had about 60 years experience under her belt before I even tasted it! I've been making it since I was about 20 (don't do the math, but I guess that makes 16 years for me). Grandma died when I was 12, and there was NO LEFSE for the family holidays. No one else had made it without Grandma before. (well, maybe Layne did once in college or something??) I was home from college and told mom, I think we need to make lefse. Thank goodness she knew the basic technique (also kind of messy)... becuase Grandma's recipe looked like a mystery to me.

As I recall it looked something like this:
10 pounds white potatoes with butter, salt, sugar and milk.
Mash. Rice.
Add
1 stick of butter
1/4 cup sugar
1 tsp. salt2 cups flour
more flour

Roll. Bake.

After a few tries and lots of severe mess ups... we finally arrived at a product that was soft, mostly round... and great with butter and sugar!

I remeber asking Grandma some other time of year,
"when are you going to make lefse again?" She replied quickly,
"lefse is for Christmas, ONLY."

Anyway, back to my point. I can give up a lot of things at Christmas, for the purpose of preserving my sanity.... we don't do stockings (or Santa), we have a VERY small tree (this year), we aren't doing a lot of Christmas cookies (becuase the two adults in the house would like to try to NOT gain weight this holiday season)... but I just can't have Christmas without some sort of lefse.... somewhere.



OK -- I have to re-phrase that.... "Some sort of lefse" does not equal mass-produced or commercially produced lefse. If I was satisfied with that, I'd go really cheap and schmear butter and sugar on a white flour tortilla. (sorry Jason).