Still Trying to Catch Up!

I have a pot of pasta boiling on the stove, and it's got about 4 more minutes, so I thought I'd sit down really quick and share with you what I did yesterday...besides my doctor visit.

I was going through some things in the pantry and discovered that I had a 5 pound bag of potatoes that needed to be cooked...fast! So, I peeled and cut up the entire bag and proceeded to make a small batch of potato salad, a small batch of mashed potatoes, and a large batch of lefse! (That sound you just heard was all of the misplaced Norwegians in the tri-county area, dropping what they were doing and trying to figure out how to find me and get some of that lefse! Or maybe it was just my mom and my sister...) Either way, lefse is rare down here and we usually only get some when my parents go for a visit up to Minnesota and bring it back with them. However, I had all of those potatoes...and someone from my husband's work gave us a Panini maker for Christmas, and it just occurred to me that perhaps it would make good lefse. Guess what? It does!!! Yum.Yum.Yum. (For all of you non-Norwegians out there, the easiest way I can describe lefse to you would be to say that it is like a thin tortilla but it's made with potatoes and you spread butter on it and sprinkle some sugar over the butter, roll it up and taste a little bit of heaven...we've also used cinnamon sugar when we eat it with our breakfast!)

Any way, aside from teaching the kids school and going to the doctor, that's about all I did yesterday. I did want to share with you one trick though that I learned from my sister-in-law, Grit, that is fabulous!
When you are boiling potatoes for mashed potatoes or potato salad, throw some onions in the water with the potatoes. Grit uses white onions and dices them tiny and they just melt into the potatoes when she mashes them. I, prefer purple onions but don't want little purple skins in my mashed potatoes, so I leave the onions in big chunks and remove them before I mash the potatoes. This way, your potatoes soak in all that yummy onion flavor and it really makes those mashed potatoes extra yummy! Thanks Grit!