Family Weekend

 My mother came to stay this weekend to attend the fiber festival.  By Friday suppertime my brother had joined us after drill and my sister and her kids arrived from Rochester.  Friday morning, Mom and I took a little field trip to SR Harris and I drove!  The Brooklyn Park location is not very far from here.  We used the Garmin of course and laughed when we arrived because Garmin called it "Senior Harris"!

 It was the least busy I'd ever seen the place so I shamelessly took some pictures to post.  This is leather in a rainbow of colors hung over the doorway.

 Trims!  Cord!  Gimp!  Fringe!  Tassels!  Piping!  Appliques!  Lace!

 The place is piled high with specialty fabrics.  You can grab someone and tell them you want such and such up there and they'll get a ladder and dig it out for you.

 This is one of the many aisles in this fabric WAREHOUSE and I can't stress that enough.  It is huge.  My mom was once sewing a specialty period costume and ended up not having quite enough of her particular fabric.  She called and the guy told her to mail him a sample of it and they FOUND it and charged her card and mailed it to her.  Amazing.

 They have barrels of zippers, buttons, pillow forms, remnants, appliques, shoelaces, etc. throughout the store.  I bought a bunch of fabulous linen this day.

 

You cut your own fabric here too unless it is over 5 yards.  I don't have any pictures of Brenda on here so here she is cutting fabric the last time she was up here and we all went!

After all that shopping we were hungry and I had kumla in mind.  When I was a young warthog in Luther League, the confirmands helped make the kumla every spring for our Lutheran church's kumla supper.  We'd all come the night before with our vegetable peelers and peel scores of pounds of potatoes and leave them in big tubs of water overnight.  The following morning we'd grind the potatoes and mix the dough.  The leaders would simmer the dumplings all afternoon and we'd come back and wait the tables for the actual supper.

On Friday we started by bringing 2 big pots of water and ham hocks to a boil to get our broth ready.  I'd been waiting to use this meat for kumla!

 At church we'd always use a clamp-on-the-counter cast iron meat grinder to grind up the potatoes.  You don't really want to grate the potatoes because then they get too wet.  I used my Saladmaster to grate the potatoes because they don't get wet as with a box grater.

 I don't have an official recipe because you use the dump method for this.  You add a couple tablespoons of salt, a sprinkling of baking powder and enough flour until it is almost like a bread dough.  It is a sticky mess but well worth it.  You can use whole wheat flour and some people put oatmeal in it.  Wet your hands and form them into tennis sized balls and drop them into the simmering broth.  Some people press a piece of bacon or ham or salt pork into the center.

 Poke around in the pot with a wooden spoon to prevent them from sticking to the bottom and burning.  After a few minutes they will begin to float.  Simmer them for at least an hour before serving.  The house smelled like the Lutheran church basement!  Pick the ham hocks and serve the meat.  We always have applesauce with kumla. 

Serve with butter and salt and pepper.  My nephew and nieces are going through a very picky eating phase and don't like potatoes so we told them they were pizza balls and they ate them!