So here I am sitting in my kitchen on a crisp, fall, Minnesota evening drinking a German beer and cooking pumpkin soup.  October in Minnesota is quite spectacular with leaves brilliant shades of orange, red and yellow.  We enjoy autumn with warm bowls of soup, hot apple cider, and great big orange pumpkins that we carve into memorable faces.  Traditionally, instead of Halloween, Germans celebrate basically the entire month of October and they call it Oktoberfest (actually, this is the exact same way one would spell ‘October party’ in Norwegian).   During Oktoberfest, Germans drink copious amounts of beer and they eat a lot of bratwursts.  Bratwursts are typically smothered with saurkraut and hot mustard and wrapped up in a piece of hearty German bread or in a sliced roll, much like the American hot dog bun.

Is your mouth watering yet?  Mine is, as I sit patiently waiting for my pumpkin soup to mature, wondering where the meat and potatoes are…well, in Norway all the hype is about pølser. Pølser are Norwegian hot dogs (very similar to American hotdogs and nothing like German bratwursts) wrapped in a lompe–which is essentially lefse, a flatbread made of potatoes, butter, cream, and flour.  Lefse is perhaps the most common Norwegian-American Christmas food.  When most Americans think of lefse, they think of warm potato flatbread with butter and sugar wrapped up inside.  The pølse uses the warm potato bread, but creates an entirely new culinary delight.   Norwegians eat pølse wrapped up in lompe with ketchup and mustard aplenty, and perhaps even some mashed potatoes shoved into the mix.  Pølser can be found throughout Norway at street vendors, gas stations, cafeterias, and even some restaurants!  They can be enjoyed as a late breakfast, a quick lunch during a study break, a snack before you hop on the t-bane (Norwegian semi-underground subway system), or a late night treat after a night on the town.  The point is that pølser are enjoyed daily by Norwegians.

My soup is ready now and it tastes fantastic.  However, my mouth is salivating for a warm, juicy, pølse fresh out of the 711 I passed every day when I went to university in Oslo.  My boyfriend is a hog farmer, so you’d think I’d be more satisfied with fresh smoked bratwursts, but my tummy yearns for those Norwegian pølser.

Stay tuned this winter for more on lefse…