I\u2019m sure most of my readers remember that song, but as a blog title, it\u2019s rather misleading. There is no Dinah here, but there\u2019s lots of stuff about kitchens.<\/p>\n
In our house, when the holidays show up, Thanksgiving and Christmas both, and because my mother, Evie, was 100% Swedish, so does lefse. (By the way, my full-of-business Mr. Auto-Correct, decided to turn lefse into leaves. Obviously my spell-checker isn\u2019t Scandinavian.)<\/p>\n
I mentioned lefse in last week\u2019s blog. One readers indicated that he had found a recipe and was threatening to try making some on his own. I wish him the best of luck, but making lefse isn\u2019t easy. If you\u2019ve never tasted lefse, it generally resembles a flour tortilla, but it\u2019s made from mashed potatoes instead of flour, and what comes off the hot griddle is supposed to be round.<\/p>\n
During our last Christmas in Phoenix before moving to Seattle, I decided to make lefse for Lil Jul Aften, Little Christmas Eve, another of my mother\u2019s Swedish customs, which is usually celebrated the Sunday before Christmas. Due to scheduling constraints it\u2019s now easier for our family to do so the Sunday after Christmas rather than the one before. But hey, Lil Jul Aften is a moveable feast.<\/p>\n
That year I told my daughter, who was in the second grade at the time, that I was keeping her home from school the next day to make lefse. \u201cBut, Mom,\u201d she said. \u201cYou can\u2019t keep me home from school to do that.\u201d \u201cYes, I can,\u201d I told her. \u201cFor decades Mexican moms have kept kids home from school to help them make tamales. This is the same thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
She stayed home. We made lefse. Lefse dough is very sticky. Rolling it out requires LOTS of flour, and most of the pieces we made that day weren\u2019t round at all. They came closer to resembling droopy elephant ears, but they still tasted good. A day later, when my African American cleaning lady showed up, she looked at the fine dusting of flour on the Saltillo tile throughout our house, glanced at me in dismay, and asked, \u201cWhat happened?\u201d Turns out she\u2019d never heard of lefse, either.<\/p>\n
This year our lefse comes to us from lefse.com, aka Countryside Lefse, located in Blair, Wisconsin. I will NOT be making it on my own. At this point, it\u2019s too much work, and I gave up my last lefse stick about twenty years ago.<\/p>\n
And now for the other piece of this kitchen-centric blog update. My father was Danish. My mother was Swedish, so I\u2019m 100% Scandinavian, and Scandinavians run on coffee. My folks had breakfast coffee, forenoon coffee at mid-morning, and afternoon coffee around three in the afternoon. I felt really grown up when, on the first day of school when I was in the 8th Grade, there was a coffee cup of my very own waiting at my place at the breakfast table.<\/p>\n
I do not drink lattes. I do not drink mochas. I do not use cream and\/or sugar. I drink coffee\u2014plain and black. That\u2019s the fuel I need to write books. I met my first coffee-bean-grinding coffee maker in an automobile garage waiting room sometime back in the nineties. It was very small and had to be refilled with water after three or four cups, so we looked around until we found my dream machine, a Delonghi Magnifica. It takes up a good deal of counter space because the tank is large enough to hold eight or so cups of water.<\/p>\n
We bought our first Magnifica in the early 2000s and placed it on the counter of our house in Tucson. Then when we moved from a Seattle condo into a much larger home here in Bellevue, we needed a second coffee machine because hauling one back and forth between Tucson and Seattle just wasn\u2019t feasible. Then when we had to give up our second home in Tucson, the second Magnifica ended up in storage in the garage at this end of the road.<\/p>\n
My preferred coffee cup is a thermal metal mug that holds what the Magnifica considers two cups of coffee. The mug can be clicked closed, so the coffee remains at a comfortable drinking temperature for a long time. I usually work my way through four mugs over the course of a day\u2014breakfast, mid-morning, early afternoon and late afternoon. I stop drinking around five-thirty in the evening, and there\u2019s usually some coffee remaining in the bottom of the cup when it goes into the dishwasher.<\/p>\n
A few years ago, Magnifica # 1 came back from Arizona and went to work here, while Magnifica # 2, the one originally based in Seattle, went into storage in the garage. A year or so later, Magnifica # 1 suffered a hiccup and quit working. To avert a caffeine-deprivation crisis, Magnifica # 2 came in from the garage and started grinding. It\u2019s a lot noisier than the other one and sounds like a machine gun firing when it starts up. Then our go-to-guy had a bright idea. He took an air hose to Magnifica # 1 and blew out all the crud. Magically, it went back to work, and worked just fine until two weeks ago. Then it quit, seemingly like Grandfather\u2019s clock\u2014never to go again. This time the air-hose treatment didn\u2019t do a bit of good.<\/p>\n
So the Machine-gun-Kelly,Magnifica came out of the garage and back into the kitchen. Noisy, yes, but at least it gets the job done. Then one night it occurred to me that, since these coffee makers are relatively expensive, maybe there\u2019s someone around here who fixes them. Sure enough a company called Bellevue Small Appliance Repair, now located in Redmond, magically filled the bill.<\/p>\n
Our coffee machine situation is now fixed and for far less money than it would have taken to purchase a replacement. The quiet one is back on the kitchen counter while the noisy one is once again relegated to a shelf in the garage. It turns out not only is Magnifica # 1 quiet, it\u2019s also something of an undercover spy. According to the repairman, there\u2019s a cup-counter inside. Over the course of the last twenty-five years, it\u2019s made more than 10,000 cups of coffee, most of them consumed by yours truly.<\/p>\n
And even though purchasing a new Delonghi Magnifica may seem like an enormous investment, I can tell you for sure that I\u2019ve saved a ton of money by drinking my freshly ground coffee at home rather than visiting one of our neighborhood coffee stands.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m just not buying what they\u2019re selling!<\/p>\n
Happy Thanksgiving one day late.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019m sure most of my readers remember that song, but as a blog title, it\u2019s rather misleading. There is no Dinah here, but there\u2019s lots of stuff about kitchens. In our house, when the holidays show up, Thanksgiving and Christmas both, and because my mother, Evie, was 100% Swedish, so does lefse. (By the way, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Someone\u2019s in the Kitchen with Dinah","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[88],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thanksgiving"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-Sn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3371\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}