Potato Lefse from the Tomb Raider Cookbook
Lefse is a soft flatbread or pancake from Norway, made with mashed potatoes and slightly sweetened, then griddled and served with butter and cinnamon sugar. They were the next Tomb Raider Cookbook dish I made, and the bulk of the work was done a day in advance, making them even easier!
Lara Croft has never visited mainland Norway in her adventures, but in Tomb Raider: Underworld, she does travel to Jan Mayen, an island in the Arctic Ocean and a Norwegian territory. Normally uninhabited, in the Tomb Raider universe it is the site of Valhalla, and chock full of nasty Thralls. As Lara asks after descending a long shaft, "Where are the Valkyries when you need them?" She goes there to retrieve Mjolnir, Thor's hammer, after finding his gauntlets and belt elsewhere in the world. What ensues is a breathtaking sequence of platforming and combat across unstable ground, culminating in Lara collecting the hammer.
To make lefse, you first need to boil and mash potatoes, russets in this case, and then let them chill like that in the fridge. The recipe says to let them rest for two hours to overnight. I ended up leaving them for a day and a half, because I was testing recipes from a different cookbook (which I'll touch on another time), enjoying them with close friends the next day, and then working the next. It made no difference in my opinion, if only making them more suitable for pancakes.
My first one came out terribly, although whose first pancake doesn't? It's because I didn’t flower the flatbread enough, which caused it to fall apart in the pan. However, I still cooked it and left a dampened, rung out paper towel over each of them as I went so they wouldn’t dry out. Some Lefse came out better than others, and others had to be re-rolled because they stuck to the counter, even though I heavily floured it. I made eight as the recipe called for.
The lefse were very nice! Soft, pillowy, sweet, but not at all saccharine. As is standard, I rolled them up after putting butter and sugar on them. Someone I fed it to said it could use some more cinnamon, so I added more to the top of each one. Indeed, many recipes online have you use that in addition to the butter and sugar. Why didn’t the cookbook say to? Luckily, I had some leftover cinnamon sugar in the fridge and I made good use of that. Upon showing the recipe to a Norwegian friend of mine, she endorsed it. That's high praise!
If you want to make this recipe for Potato Lefse yourself, you can find it in Tomb Raider: The Official Cookbook and Travel Guide.
