Happy Birthday, Mom!

Happy 60th Birthday, Mom!!!
I love you!

The lefsa tradition continues

As a kid, my Grama (Simmons) would make a whole host of Norwegian confections. We ate ourselves sick on krum kake (a Cannoli-like rolled vanilla cookie), sandbakkels (shortbread pressed and baked into flowery and ornate metal tins), rosettes (light, airy, and crispy cookies made on a rose-shaped branding iron dipped into thin pancake-like batter and then fried and dusted with powdered sugar), and the food-stuff that got all of us, kid or adult, standing in line at the kitchen door...lefsa.

Lefsa is a potato-based, Norwegian tortilla. It is the greatest thing to ever happen to the little tuber! Lefsa is quite labor intensive and involves the cooking of the paper-thin dough (made from mashed potatoes, butter, cream, and flour) on a hot griddle. It's thinness requires a delicate hand in rolling, moving, and cooking, and it takes many attempts to finally produce a perfectly toasty, un-holey, light and tasty lefsa.

In recent years before my grama's passing, we made it a point to have a day at her house dedicated solely to the perfection of lefsa. Luckily, my mom paid really close attention and herself has become the lefsa matriarch of the family. So, this Christmas we decided to celebrate our family, present and whole-heartedly missed, and had a lefsa making party at Mom's house!

Mom rolling out the lefsa dough with the special honey-combed lefsa roller.

Mom using the "lefsa stick" (often hand-made by my grandfather because none my grandmother could find commercially were ever thin enough to fit under the dough just right) to turn the lefsa on the griddle.

The fruits of our labor.

God jul (Merry Christmas), everyone!!!

Christmas Party at Melissa's

I'm a bit late in posting this, but...

Missy finally has her own place in Davis and she's made it a sweet, little home! She invited Mom, Dad, Paul, and me to her house this past month for a little Christmas party. She and my mom made the greatest food for the occasion...stuffed mushrooms, chicken wings, sun-dried tomato dip, pot stickers, egg rolls, gingerbread cookies, krum kake (a Norwegian cookie tradition in our family), and many other delicious concoctions. We ate, drank, and had a great time being entertained by Melissa's menagerie of pets.

Funny, as I looked back through photographs of the occasion, the most were taken of Bun Buns (Melissa's rabbit) and Paul playing together. Paul really likes Buns, and there have already been "discussions" about adding one to our family one day. In the meantime, Melissa lets us "borrow" her brood! It's good practice...

I love sunsets

The geography of Yolo County leaves nothing, really, to be desired. You've got lakes and creeks and plenty of mountains for hiking. The birds love the area, so we're never at a loss for hawks, falcons, or smaller song birds. And we are so fortunate as to be close enough to the lung-clogging pollution of the east bay and Fairfield to, in turn, experience the most vivid and awesome sunsets imaginable:

Our backyard...

Our backyard...again...

Melissa's backyard...