Potato Dumplings & Smashing a Pig

On Christmas eve the Mecham house gets interesting. Everyone gets all pumped and ready to eat potato dumplings for dinner.

The preperation starts in the morning. You gotta have two big pots filled with water. Then you throw some ham hocks in and let it boil all day, until the house smells like, well, ham - who would have thought?!

Then the real potato dumpling fun begins.

Different people pitch in and help each year, but there is one individual who is ALWAYS in charge; that person is Grandma Andreasen.

Background information: Potato dumplings are a Norwegian dish. The Andreasen blood that runs through the Arvel and Goodie Mecham family demands that every Christmas eve (and then pan fried on Christmas morning - which makes them taste a bit better) there be potato dumplings.

This time, Luke decided that he wanted to help with the potato dumpling making process.

To make the potato dumpling dough, you start out with lots of grated potatoes (a big THANK YOU goes out to Barbie and Todd who peeled two bags of potatoes so that the grating process would go quicker). It is best to have an electric machine of sorts to do this for you. They used a Bosch (Goodie hasn't been converted to the true and righteous path of the KitchenAid yet).

Sometimes you can mix things up and make two different sizes of grated potatoes for the potato dumplings. (As seen below)

*Notice the discoloration of the different sizes. The grated potatoes for potato dumplings discolor very quickly - we're talking in a few minutes. A couple of years ago we didn't grate fast enough and all the grated potatoes turned gray.*

After you have an adequate amount of grated potatoes (there were two BIG bowls full) you begin add ingredients to make a dough. This is where Grandma Andreasen's presence is CRITICAL. Only she knows the right ingredient proportions for potato dumplings; only she can tell you when you are doing it wrong.

This is a top secret family recipe, so I can't tell you exactly what is in the potato dumplings (besides the obvious potatoes) but I will tell you this, there aren't very many ingredients.

After Grandma says that the dough isn't going to get any better than it already is, you start to make the potato dumpling balls. You put the balls in the pots (ham hocks have been removed, only an exorbitant amount of boiling flavored water remains). You cook the potato dumpling balls until they are done - a.k.a. semi-hard as a rock.

*Luke is disgusted with the thought of putting even lotion on his hands. The fact that he is rubbing his hands in Crisco means that he truly loves potato dumplings with his whole heart.*

The finished product looks like this.

Everyone eats the potato dumplings cut up into pieces and drowned in butter because, according to the family, that's the only way you are going to get them to go down and be able to digest them. Without the butter, they would just sit in your stomach like a rock until you die.


If you were born a Mecham (or an Andreasen) you were born with a love for potato dumplings. If you married into the family, potato dumplings are one of those things that you endure because you love your new family. Everyone agrees that potato dumplings should only be eaten at Christmas time because that is when they taste the best.

*Z is a true Mecham; she loves potato dumplings.*

Confession: Potato dumplings aren't my favorite thing, but I have eaten things that were much worse in my life. Luke ate, like, six or something Christmas eve and I had only one. They aren't too bad - and the butter does help. They are better Christmas morning when you cut them up and fry them up like hash-browns. I LOVE this tradition! Potato dumplings are something you can count on at Christmas.

Goodie got a peppermint pig from a friend of hers and we decided to do the activity associated with it as we finished up dinner.

You put the pig in a little velvet pouch and then you "tap" it with a little hammer and say something good that happened to you over the past year.

*This is Grandma Andreasen. :)*

*Aslynn is informing her cousins that she doesn't need help, thank you very much.*

After everyone has said their good thing, you dump the broken peppermint pig into a bowl and eat it!

*One of our nieces loves pigs and she was into the whole tap with a hammer thing until we dumped out the broken pig and told her to eat a piece. This, to her, was an abomination. She liked the pig and it had been smashed to smithereens. We were mean people, indeed.*

Christmas eve was WONDERFUL!

Fact: I said "potato dumpling(s)" 20 times in this post. :)