News and Views:

Another Bite Hits the Road

The Best Birthday Breakfast of All

What to Do with Your Wine Corks

The Big Dig: Starting the Gardening Season Off Right

Another Bite Hits the Road

The Best
Birthday
Breakfast of All

Osseo is a small town in the midst of meticulously kept dairy farms in northwestern Wisconsin, a land settled and still populated by Scandinavian (mostly Norwegian) farmers and tradesmen. The first thing we saw when we walked into the Norske Nook was the pie case, each pie distinctive — some double-crusted, some open-faced or lattice-topped, some nobbled with brown-sugar streusel or heaped with whipped cream. The second thing we noticed was a group of older gentlemen seated at a large round table, talking, drinking coffee, eating pie, and having a grand old time. The waitress seated us in a side dining room — this one enlivened by a corner table of nicely coiffed older ladies leaning over their coffee and enjoying themselves as much as the menfolks were.

Pleasing the locals with farm-fresh home cooking is what has made the Norske Nook prosperous, and it’s what made my birthday breakfast special. Although the pies — at least ten different kinds — were tempting, we were really hungry and ready for some real food. We drank coffee and studied the menu. Molly ordered buttermilk pancakes; I asked for the Lefse Omelet.

Lefse, for the uninitiated, is like a Norwegian tortilla, only softer and thinner, more like a crepe. It’s made from cooked potatoes, flour, melted butter, and cream, rolled very thin and cooked on a griddle, and you traditionally find it paired with Lutefisk, which is dried codfish (and pretty nasty, in my opinion, but I’m not Norwegian). Lefse makes a wonderful envelope, as illustrated by my omelet. Rolled up inside the lefse (which, unfolded, would have been the size of a large dinner plate) were soft scrambled eggs, chunks of spicy sausage, and crisp, lacy hash-brown potatoes. Golden hollandaise sauce flowed over the top of the lefse and pooled on the plate. It was a breakfast fit for a lumberjack, or someone who got up at 4:30 a.m. to milk the cows. It was totally delicious, and I ate every bite.

Molly’s pancakes, also the size of dinner plates, were light and golden, the perfect sponge for maple syrup. (No "Clean Plate Club" for her, despite a valiant effort.)

Now we arrived at the only unhappy moment in the whole experience: we realized we were too full for pie. It was probably a blessing, for how would we have decided among banana cream, blueberry, butterscotch, chocolate, cranberry-apple, lemon meringue, pecan fudge, peach, coconut, raspberry cream cheese, and sour cream raisin?

We compromised with one of the Nook’s enormous pecan sticky buns (to go), plus a souvenir coffee mug and some of the strong Torke coffee favored by all those retired Norwegian dairy farmers and their wives. It was easily the best birthday breakfast in memory. I only wish it weren’t such a long commute.

Norwegian Omelet

Here’s how to make lefse, in case you are inspired to try that Norwegian omelet...

4 large russet potatoes
2 tablespoons melted butter
2 tablespoons half-and-half cream
1/2 to 3/4 cup flour

Peel the potatoes and boil in salted water until done. Drain, shaking the pan over the heat to thoroughly dry the potatoes. Mash the potatoes with the butter and the cream. Stir in the flour, adding enough to make a dough that is soft but not sticky. Dough may be covered and refrigerated overnight if desired.

Form the dough into small balls, using about 1/4 cup dough for each ball. On a floured board, roll out each ball to a thin circle 8" to 10" in diameter. Transfer the circle to a hot, dry griddle or cast-iron frying pan (special lefse sticks are used for this, but you may also use chopsticks or the rolling pin) and cook for about a minute on each side, until lightly brown and bubbled. Stack the lefse with squares of waxed paper between layers, and use as desired — as a "wrap" for omelets or other fillings, as a foil for lutefisk, or buttered while warm and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar as a treat. Makes 6 to 8 lefse.

What to Do with Your Wine Corks
(for those who are truly desperate for a project)

The first idea, for the handy person, is to build a side table or cocktail table with a recessed top. Glue an army of upright corks, shoulder to shoulder, to the top and fasten a layer of heavy glass across the top of the corks. The effect of all the circular brown and gold corks under the glass is quite pretty and unusual. It takes a lot of corks —hundreds — to make a table of any size, so you might ask your friends to contribute to your cork collection lest you be tempted to overindulge.

Two other ideas, as suggested recently by The New York Times, are far and away more practical. One is to cut corks across the middle and stick them on the ends of sharp knives and other pointy objects in kitchen drawers. (We also know someone who sticks them on the ends of knitting needles so the work in progress doesn’t slip off.) The other is to shove them under the steel handles of pot lids. Although the steel handles can get too hot to touch, the corks don’t, so you can simply lift the lids by grabbing the corks.

The Big Dig:
Starting the Gardening Season Off Right

Many of us who love to cook also love to garden, for the pure pleasure and ease of having fresh vegetables and herbs at hand at mealtime. Even if you have room only for a few large containers on a balcony or deck, you can start to plan your kitchen garden right now.

*Scope: do you want flowers, herbs, and vegetables? Try sketching out your garden on graph paper, laying out rows running north to south, taller plants to the north. If you have only a sunny corner, how intensively can you plant it? What are your priorities? Most seed catalogs (paper and online) have sample garden designs that help you estimate what you can grow in your space and exposure.

*Think outside the box: Plants do not have to grow in rows like soldiers; herbs, flowers, and vegetables do not have to be segregated from each other. You can use herbs as landscaping plants, vegetables as hanging container plants or trellis climbers (peas and beans are great for this), flowers intermingled in a crazy-quilt cutting garden. Plan for a few curved rows, add a knot garden for herbs, position fragrant plants near a garden bench.

*Prepare the soil: How do you know when the ground is dried out enough so you can turn it over or till in compost and manure? Pick up a chunk of soil the size of a baseball, and squeeze it together. Open your hand. If the dirt stays balled up or feels mucky, it’s too wet to work. If it falls apart, it’s ready for tilling. (To tell if the soil is warm enough to plant seeds, and entertain your neighbors at the same time, sit in the garden bare-bottomed. If it’s warm enough for your comfort, it’s warm enough for seeds.)

This spring, if you live in an area that is experiencing unusually dry conditions, as we are in New England, consider not tilling at all. Many gardeners have realized that rain and earthworms are just as effective as the rototiller in helping organic matter and fertilizer penetrate into the ground. Planting directly in untilled ground helps to conserve soil moisture. Any additional organic matter spread on top of the ground, rather than being tilled in, will also help to protect the surface from drying sun and winds.

This, of course, does not apply to grassy areas that you want to convert to garden space, ground that has never been tilled, or ground that is heavily compacted from being walked or driven upon. In those cases, you’ll just have to get out there and dig. Till, we meet again!

Next month: Ten Top Candidates for a Kitchen Garden

Back to Top