We didn't have to be in Minot long to hear about Hostfest, North America's largest Scandinavian festival. Although we weren't quite sure what to expect, we venture to the state fairgrounds on a gorgeous Friday night to find out.
We started out with some dinner. The kids chose "safe" options like a hot dog and pizza. Jason and I were slightly braver. He chose a kind of hot dog with some type of dumpling and saurekraut (which he picked off every last piece of!). I got a "Viking on a stick" which was a type of sausage meatball covered in a dough and fried-- yum!
After dinner we walked room to room talking to vendors, seeing tons of arts/ crafts, and seeing people we knew, which is a huge deal when you've only been in a city a couple months!
Lastly, we hunted down some empleskievers (sorry, I still can't figure out the correct spelling of these), which I had been dying to try.
We received a special plan to make these a few years ago and the directions for our pan says to use a thin pancake batter and put the jelly on the inside. These were more yeast-like, almost like a doughnut hole, and jelly was served on the side.
As we were chowing on empleskievers , we found that the whole shin-dig was done at 8:00, so like it or not, we were on our way home (or maybe to Tutti Fruiti!).
Last December we sat down to discuss what kind of special days we would like to put on the calendar for 2012. These include things like once-a-month Pizza and a Redbox Night, or Wii Night, or celebrating Dr. Seuss' birthday.
Eli said that he wanted to have an "apple" night once during the year. He suggested it be a dinner focusing on apples. It made sense to me to put it on Johnny Appleseed's birthday, September 26 (Yep, I'm way that on blogging!).
Dinner was pork chops with apples, apple juice (a huge treat around here), and apple pie. Of course, we had to sing the Johnny Appleseed song for our prayer.
After dinner, we did a craft. Of course, my original plan was a Pintastic beauty... but I settled on something a little more old school (and easier)-- apple stamps.
In the end, this was a huge hit with all the kids (which is quite a feat when there's an 8 year age gap from youngest to oldest!).
I love these "holidays" that we have celebrated this year. It just goes to show, you can make amazing memories, even on a Wednesday night!
