night heron books & coffehouse
Address: 107 E. Ivinson Avenue, Laramie, WY 82070
Website: https://nightheron.square.site/
Country Represented: Denmark and Ukraine
Special:
Smorrebrod- open face sandwiches (Denmark)
Walnut Crescent Cookies (Ukraine)
Drinks:
Belgian Chocolate Rooibos tea (non-alcoholic)
Belgian Coffee made with cointreau and Bailey's Irish cream (alcoholic).
Emily Edgar (Denmark)
UW Creative Services
(Normay): Smorrebrod: rye or pumpernickel open faced sandwiches topped with butter, meat, fish, or eggs Smorrebrod- start with bread- open face sandwiches are popular- even just bread and butter- great fusion potential This beloved Danish national dish can be as simple as "bread and butter," but the hungry Danes are bound to start layering on pickles and proteins like sardines or ham.
Deb Kleinman (Ukraine)
Consultant
(Ukraine) In the 1960s, my mother—raised Presbyterian—married my father, who was raised in a Jewish family on Long Island. This kind of interfaith marriage was far less common then than it is now, and both families were shades of uncomfortable with the relationship. They expressed that discomfort in ways that were mostly invisible to me as a child, registering only as a low-grade sense that things were occasionally a bit tense.
My paternal grandmother, Mary, immigrated to the United States from Ukraine when she was about six years old, fleeing the pogroms that terrorized her village. She told stories of her mother hiding her in the backyard bread oven when Cossacks rode through, searching for Jews to kill. Understandably, she remained a complicated woman for as long as I knew her. Today we would recognize this as PTSD and intergenerational trauma. She was shaped by loss and survival, and was also a loving grandmother in her own distinctive way. She taught me to play cards and made me jewelry created from shells she collected during her beach walks.
Every December, she mailed our family a box of walnut crescent cookies. They arrived in a reused cardboard box, wrapped in wax paper, slightly crushed but unmistakably perfect. I cannot find the index card with her recipe written on it in pencil, in her shaky handwriting. They crossed religious and cultural boundaries effortlessly, offering sweetness without argument—a small, tender annual gift given by an immigrant grandmother to her three grandchildren.