How Quickly We Learn

Even when we’re young we pick up clues pretty swiftly regarding what sort of behavior and attitude is expected of us in our interactions with others. As a child, I learned ever so quickly that I am not the boss of anyone else and practically everyone else is the boss of me, and not much has ever changed in that department. Whether happily or unfortunately, depending entirely on your point of view, I also figured out as speedily as most kids do that as long as I behaved in the expected manner when anyone was watching I could get away with a fair amount of far more self-indulgent–if not subversive–ways. Sure does simplify my life!Show of Proper Respect

The Mistress in her jewelry and finery and furs

Thinks everyone should bow and kiss the ground—that’s also hers—

And genuflect before her grand tiara and her mace,

So that is what we tend to do—at least do to her face.All frivolous jocularity on the topic aside, however, getting trained by our elders and betters, in particular our mothers, is both more complicated and more happily meaningful for those of us who are blessed with great moms. Me, I’ve got two. The mother who gave birth to me and raised me from my days as an only mildly subversive little sprout into the silly but exceedingly happy big kid you see before you today is worthy of recognition as one of the great teachers not only for giving me a framework on which to hang my sense of right and wrong and general grasp of manners but also the education and freedom and knowledge of being unconditionally loved that enabled me to choose how to build on those foundations as I grew. My second Mom, brought to me courtesy of (her son) my beloved husband, gets credit for instilling the same curiosity and drive in her children and, in turn, for reinforcing in me through her example what it means to be a lively and lovely person who is good company, an active part of the household and community at every turn, and a tireless learner and adventurer who earns her place in those settings with remarkable grace. Whether I can live up to the standards set by either of my Moms remains to be seen, but they certainly give me the tools that should make it possible if anything can.

If it can’t, I guess I’ll have to fall back on my naturally ridiculous ways and just pretend to be better than I am for as long as I can keep up the front. Those of you who are looking for reliably good, sound company, go see Mom W and Mom S. And also my sisters and my sister-in-law, great mothers to their children, and all of those other mothers, who by birth, adoption, random acquisition and teaching, raise better people, who in turn make the world a better place altogether. All of whom I thank profusely not only on Mother’s Day but every day for being such great examples even for those of us who are a little too childish to be motherly examples ourselves. Go ahead, you can say it right in front of me. I’ve learned that much, at least!

The Green Man is on the Move

Though he may well have sprung from the roots of ancient earthbound deities, the Green Man remains alive and well and, at this season, inhabits garden and woodland alike, filling sun and shadow with his mischievous magicks. And this presence is a very welcome thing indeed. Few things can compare with the appearance of those tender sprouts, however miniscule and vulnerable, that bring new signs of life to the winter’s loamy floor, unfurl their banners on the tiniest twig of the smallest shrub. The mere sight of one small tip of leaf can bring an upsurge of life to the dormant veins of even a hardened person who’s waited through the dark and chill for newness to arrive.

Did the long freeze of January kill that little sapling that I found? No, here’s the faint, alluring swelling of a bud, the blushing edge of a leaflet, soon to open wide in exuberant yellow-green shouts of Spring. Has the ice of the short days and long, long nights wholly buried and killed my favorite herb, both branch and root? No, I see a hairline stripe of promising verdure in the bony bark of its woody little stem. Life is a bold, determined act, and with its brazen call brings out the denizens of Earth, first the bud and then the bloom, one small broken seed shooting out a multitude of growing things at the conjuring wave of the Green Man’s hand. Like him, I cannot help but grin when the world begins again to wake in leafy laughter.

Pastorale

Mormor's swing, tucked into a corner under the maple tree that in springtime was full of naturalized trilliums, bleeding heart, wild currant, Scilla and other northwest treasures, and in summer, covered with Clematis durandii from foot to arbor . . .

This coming week I get to have consultations for bids on redoing our yard landscape! As I’ve plotted the Q&A lists extensively over time, I have been more and more recollecting my mother’s gardening style and values, and beyond that, returning to her father’s–Gramps’s. Their influences remain deeply embedded in my own ethos of gardening, to be sure.

I won’t be able to strictly replicate either of their styles or efforts, nor should I, since neither the climate and conditions of my current home nor my own personal imprint would make it useful or meaningful to do so. But what was truly valued by both of them in the general sense was upheld in their methods and the lovely and personal and hospitable outcomes of both because it was about combining the sensible and practical with the sort of building and design that would enable them to do more of the tasks of gardening that they each enjoyed, and fewer of those that they didn’t. In short, they were both ‘sustainable’ garden advocates long before there was such a popular trend, and they still both chose plants and arrangements and additions to the yard that suited their sentiments and likes.For Gramps, of course, there was a strong influence of frugality that came from being first an immigrant (and even before that, presumably, from being raised by typically scrupulous Norwegian savers) and then a hard-working General Motors employee (he worked on the crew that produced the first amphibious vehicles). After all of that he was an independent farmer, mainly of sheep, and then also a longtime carpenter and home builder. He was never in any get-rich business, and he appreciated old-fashioned things and earthy things, so it wasn’t a stretch for him to look with his carpenter’s eye and see in his shed the makings of all sorts of fine pasture fencing, outbuildings, picnic tables, benches and more.

Gramps's compost bins, quite beautiful in their own right and certainly very practical, as well as the models for Mom's own bins later . . . and, perhaps, mine yet to come . . .

His idea of plantings began with the practical as well, so if there was any space at all there was always a beautiful kitchen garden with corn, raspberries, potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, rhubarb, and all of that sort of loveliness, and between that and his fishing trips and raising lamb there was a lot of good eating. But beyond raising fine fruit and vegetables on his property, furnished with rich home-cooked compost from his lovely row of hand-built bins, Gramps did have a graceful nature-inspired aesthetic sensibility, capitalizing on the canopy of majestic Douglas-firs and filling in with the native understory treasury of dogwood and trilliums (the source, of course, of Mom’s first ones), azaleas and rhododendrons, ferns and primroses and bleeding hearts and yellow and fuchsia-colored wild violets. For a person who gruffly eschewed frivolity in the main, he had a mighty tender, bleeding heart of his own when it came to the beauty he saw in nature, and he capitalized on that very well in his garden.

His daughter learned from it, and being more overtly sentimental, added yet another layer of appreciation for those marvels and jewels of the natural world that she could nurture to their fullest expression in her own garden and yard, wherever she lived. She adopted her father’s practical and often laborious attentions to getting the most out of the existing landscape and quickly put her own imprint on it and enriched it over time to the degree that her yard was always rightfully an enviable small park for visitors’ delight. By the time I finished college and then spent three years working near to and therefore boarding with my grandparents, thanks to the ridiculously affordable living there–then finished grad school and started working near my parents’ place and moved back to take advantage of the ridiculously affordable living there (anybody sense a theme? I blame the genetic link to Gramps’s frugality)–I had a much greater appreciation myself for both what it took to create and maintain such glorious properties and how much respecting nature’s own local inclinations would be a value-added approach to healthy, sustainable, logical, creative and gorgeous design.I had the bonus, while living at my parents’ again, of not only the privacy and flexibility afforded me by their frequent travel for his work, but the opportunity to practice my own incipient garden design skills both while following Mom around and learning the names and natures of things and while taking things into my own hands whenever they went out of town for any length of time. First of all, having learned a couple of useful things about how to treat some of their plants, I practiced my sculptural pruning skills on them, opening up the lacy umbrella of a laceleaf maple, making faux bonsai out of some of their smaller evergreens, and limbing up tree trunks to clean and open up the space for all of the pretty understory things Mom had brought in as starts from relatives’ gardens, from her trading with friends, and from various nursery expeditions over the years. It was during this time that I especially fell in love with trees. The craggy Garry oaks native to that area are a fairly uncommon yet extraordinarily lovely and impressive variety and I nurtured a seedling or two myself along the way in hopes that sometime long after I’m dead they too will be magnificent and grand old trees sheltering their homes and their denizens like the massive ones already in town.Here in Texas, it’s the two stately post oaks and that lithe red oak in back that endeared our home to us at first notice, along with our two splendid Bradford pear trees. There’s quite the community of sweet oak seedlings sprouting in their shade, and I hope very much that I can manage (with lots of help and advice from the local experts, of course) to relocate a number of them to foster a natural-style mini-grove in a back quadrant of our property over the many years to come. That will help create a fitting foundation for the whole wild, native and well-adapted collection of plants intended to fan out from all of that into the rest of the property. Fun times ahead!

In addition, I love to incorporate some traditionally indoor materials into my gardens so they feel a little more like an extension of the house and invite leisurely visits. I’m thinking of things like the burnished brass chandelier you’ve seen tiny glimpses of in previous garden photos, a little cozy kitchen-style seating on the patio, and a bench or chairs for shaded stopping on the front porch as guests arrive for a gathering. But although I see lots of lovely yard swings around town and love them, I never see people sitting in them–it’s almost always too terribly hot and often very bug-pestered here–so there won’t likely be an investment of money and labor to create a swing like the arbor swing (above) that I designed and my brother-in-law built with my semi-able assistance, to surprise Mom with a little long-fostered-wish fulfillment, while she and Dad were off on one of their longer expeditions.

Still, I do want our yard to invite exploration and to be particularly attractive from all angles inside our air-conditioned house, year round. So many possible ways to accomplish that, that I am excited to see what I can learn and be inspired by, even from a first conversation with each of the landscapers who will visit here this week. I suspect I’ll need to be getting out all of the tools I have, and then some, and it’ll take a bit of a while to get the whole project well and truly underway. I know I’m a little rusty at some of this, having lived with tiny yards for quite some time before buying this house, and will have to relearn much and discover many new things in my new climate. But oh, how invigorating to begin!

Foodie Tuesday: Lefse as History

Mama’s Justifiably Famous Potato Lefse

[This is a recipe she developed in collusion with a group of faithful Old Norskies in Puyallup, Washington, one of whom added the strict instruction that the lefse must be rolled "so thin you can read a faded love letter through it". I've spelled out the procedure here in my own words, so Mom can't be blamed for that part of the recipe!]

8 c. cooked and finely mashed potatoes

1/4 lb. butter

1/2 T salt

1/4 c. potato cooking water plus 1/4 c. evaporated milk

2-3 c. flour + more for rolling the lefse

Take a gallon bowl filled with 8 cups of riced cooked Russet potatoes, still hot, and press 1/4-pound piece of butter into the middle of it. Put a generous 1/2 tablespoon of salt on top. Pour a mixture of 1/4 cup of the potatoes’ cooking water plus 1/4 cup of evaporated milk over the top of the salt. Mash everything together thoroughly and mix it with 2-3 cups of flour. This makes enough dough for 20 lefse. [Yes, Mom was likely to make a triple recipe or more for many occasions. Eat one piece and you'll know why.]

The flour amount should start out as small as possible and only get the potatoes into a very light dough-like, rather spongy consistency, and not stick to your hands as you mix. The more flour added, the tougher and drier the finished lefse will be. Mom almost always did the potatoes the day before their appointed baking day, rolled the tender dough into logs about 3″ in diameter and wrapped them in cling film, storing them in a cool place. The fridge is forever too crowded at the time when you’re lefse-baking for festivities of any kind, so if the weather was cool enough, the potatoes usually waited overnight on the workbench in the garage in that state for their final apotheosis.

Baking day is invariably messy and laborious, particularly on the days of multiple batch preparation. One does best to have the correct tools for the occasion, and they are many and specialized. First, you really ought to have a lefse griddle, which is a flat, circular electric griddle about 18″ in diameter and capable of reaching around 500º F in temperature. You’ll also want some nice old flour-sack dish towels or linen tea-towels to stack freshly baked lefse between on the counter as you take them off the griddle. You’ll find it helpful to have a pastry rolling cloth on your work surface, because not only will it keep the lefse from sticking as easily to the countertop, it’ll also help hold the lovely texture of the lefse’s surface that is so ideal for carrying oodles of melted butter and other fillings.

Make sure to have not just a rolling pin but an actual lefse rolling pin, a wooden pin whose roller surface is scored to create the optimum texture: some are simply grooved with parallel lines around the circumference of the roller and others, like Mom’s, textured with a full crosshatch of about 1/16th-inch grooves). Most people using the lefse rolling pins also like to use a soft cloth sleeve over the roller, because (and you can guess how I know this), a very soft, tender and potentially super-sticky dough will create a remarkably gunky agglomeration in the grooves of the pin, and lemme tell you, it’s a serious undertaking to get that concrete out ever again. Think about how many of those little grooves are on a whole rolling pin. Think fondly of an early death. Nahhh, just cover the pin.

Last and not least, it’s good to have a really fine lefse turner. Yes, the person who will flip the lefse when it is appropriately birthmarked on one side with light brown speckling to give the other side its chance for equally pretty freckling, that person will be an important part of your equipment. But even more important is the modest sword-like object known in our household as a lefse turner. It’s a flat stick around a yard/metre long. Yes, it would probably be entirely possible to use an actual sword for the purpose, but if you did, what would you use to fend off the ravening lefse-starved Viking invaders whilst baking? You could probably use a yardstick. Then you might well benefit from the ability to measure your lefse’s circumference in the very midst of moving them from griddle to stack. My mother has two lefse turners of both great practical beauty and artful grace. Gramps handcrafted them from fine-grained wood, making a 3/16″ thick x 2-1/2″ wide handle end pierced with a hanging hole and tapering them down to a soft ovoid tip less than 1/16th” thick, each turner sanded down to perfectly smooth softness so that it feels as sweet in the hand as that aforementioned sword ought to do in a master swordsman’s, and able to slip its narrowest point easily under a magically tender hot lefse to lift it from the griddle to the cooling stack.

Mama's lefse turners, handcrafted by her father, hang on her kitchen wall.

With your mise en place, off you go. Slice the log of soft potato dough into evenly measured pieces that, when you pat them gently into shape, are about the size and shape of a slightly smaller diameter, slightly thicker than typical hamburger patty (twenty pieces from a whole batch, if you remember). Keep them rather cool, so that they don’t become more difficult to roll–they’re sensitive enough as it is. Gently flour the outside of a piece of dough, pop it in the middle of a small handful of flour in the center of the pastry cloth and roll the lefse out into a circle of delicate, ethereal, dainty, lightly textured sheerness as big as you can fit on the lefse griddle–even a tiny bit too big, because it’ll retract a tad and shrink to fit the griddle as soon as it hits the 450-500º heat; test to see how quickly your griddle bakes the flatbreads without either scorching or drying them out.

You don’t want the baked lefse’s spots too dark brown–lift an edge and check occasionally as they cook. You don’t want too much flour flying around–always use the smallest amount you can get away with using. You don’t want the lefse too dry–they’ll dry a bit as it is, when they’re awaiting use. As you can imagine, during the baking day one works hard, gets hungry, and smells buttery mashed potato dough cooking, so some of the lefse will not live long enough to worry your pretty little head about any real drying-out problems with them. Some will have to be rescued from their intended wait immediately for slathering with beautiful melting butter and eaten instantly. After all, there are always some lefse that resist the most valiant efforts to make them into a perfect circle and choose instead to replicate maps of various continents, and once you get too far away from Australia-looking they’re just not going to fold into even quarters for the standard packaging and serving format and it’s best to destroy the evidence. It’s sort of like James Mason’s delightfully dry remark in ‘11 Harrowhouse‘ when he’s found apparently in the midst of removing the contents of a diamond safe: “I’ve eaten the inventory.”

What else is there to say? Roll. Bake. Lay a freshly-minted lefse flat on a clean towel and cover it with another towel. Roll. Bake. Lay the next lefse on top of the first and cover it with that top towel. Repeat until all of that carefully crafted dough is baked into giant, tissue thin circles of lightly moist flatbread. When the whole batch is done, either eat it all for supper or let it cool under its towel, carefully fold each piece into quarters and then package small stacks of the finished lefse in zipper bags for the counter, refrigerator or freezer, depending on how long until they will be eaten.

And what is all of this enormous effort for? Some, including members of my own family, would say as Grandma W said regarding lefse’s cousin kumpe (Norwegian potato dumplings) that it was “a lot of work to spoil potatoes”. Others revere them as the Norsk version of the Mexican tortilla, Middle Eastern pita, South/Central Asian naan, or any other culture’s soft flatbread. Making lefse is of course potentially a fine way both to preserve the Norwegian culture in both country and family, as well as a social event. You know me, though: Lazy Girl helped only when I had to other than in the devouring of the finished product. It was usually other relatives and friends that pitched in with Mom in the manufacturing of lefse. And it’s so fragile, both as a tensile object and in its moisture content, that it doesn’t taste good for very long.

So in my opinion, what this labor of love is about is, well, love. Secondarily, it’s about a great potato flatbread best hot off the griddle and smeared with fresh butter only, as it always was preferred in my family. Others like it best with sugar and perhaps some cinnamon sprinkled on it before it’s folded up and jammed into their mouths, and we would sometimes, if the day had grown extra long and laborious over multiple batches of lefse, make a heartier meal of it by making a sort of quesadilla out of a hot lefse with some cheddar or Jarlsberg cheese and thin slices of good ham folded and warmed inside, not a bad “sandwich” at all.

In any case, I can tell you that there are many who will vouch for Mama’s inimitable lefse as the archetype of all potato lefse. But then, you already knew that Mom is pretty much the archetype of moms, so what would you expect! As for Grandma W, she may be forgiven for thinking potato dumplings, and possibly lefse as well, too labor-intensive for their meager culinary payoff since she grew up in her immigrant father’s grocery store and might have considered it better to enjoy prepared foods in that Modern, American way.That’s Grandma, by the way, the little barefoot girl in white, Christmas-tree-tipping Auntie Ingeborg behind her, with their parents and little brother and an employee (haloed in window light) in Great-Grandpa’s grocery store. Lefse or no, they apparently did have some fine food on hand! May all of you dear readers eat well–whatever you’re eating!