Scandinavian Recipe Redux

Without Susan here this weekend (remember?), the girls had to spend the morning alone as I attended the university's commencement ceremony.  After the speeches had ended and the reading of the pages and pages and pages of graduates' names had begun, I zoned out a bit until I heard my own last name read aloud!  I looked up to see my cousin Joel's daughter Michaela walking across the stage.  Then I looked over toward her cheering section in the bleachers, and sure enough, there were my uncle and my cousins!  My cousin Myrna must have spotted me earlier because she had her eyes on me when I looked up and scanned the bleachers, and she grinned and waved!  What a fun surprise.  Michaela got her degree through our Bismarck campus, so I hadn't even recalled that she was a student of ours--therefore, it didn't occur to me that I would see relatives today (albeit only from afar).

And that wasn't the end of the day's activities . . .

I returned home in time to make dinner for the girls.  Then we logged into Skype on the computer and had a video conversation with Susan, Cassie, Davis, and Marly!  Marly slept in Susan's arms and then opened her eyes and verified our suspicions that she was a cutie pie.  Davis talked and talked and talked, showing us his trucks and calling us each by name very clearly and then sitting to play with puzzles with his mommy.  Such sweet little kids!  Cassie and Nick must be awesome parents.

Here's Marly alongside the afghan that Susan knit for her.  Such a sweet girl!

Technically, it's Susan's turn to be my helper for Scandinavian Saturday supper, but we're going to delay that another week.  It didn't seem fair to try new recipes without Susan here to partake, so I proposed to the girls that we select some of our favorite dishes from Scandinavian Saturdays past.  We did that, and here's what we ate:

The star of the meal was Swedish köttbullar ["meatballs"], a recipe that we loved when we tried it in April 2010.  To go with the meatballs and gravy, I made mashed potatoes and stirred in some chopped fresh parsley.  We had leftover steamed carrots in the fridge, so I doctored them up with butter and dill.  It was a delicious meal.

Our dessert was Norwegian krem [which means "cream," although it's actually a grape pudding--so I really don't get the name of the food], a recipe that we enjoyed when we tried it in January 2010.  It required lots of stirring while it thickened over heat, so I enlisted the girls' help with that while I washed dishes after dinner.  It was chilled and ready to serve by suppertime, and I topped it with homemade whipped cream.  "Grape pudding" may sound odd, but it is surprisingly refreshing and fun.

After we all cleaned up the supper dishes, Suzanna and I made a quick trip to the grocery store for milk for the next few days because I'm not going to be around to tend to that after tomorrow--read on . . .