Here’s my opening line.
When I write a column, I have a topic. Today’s topic is the Swedish meatballs at Ikea, and the copycat recipe I have. Then the column begins to write itself in my head—which this one has, but in an uncharacteristically fragmented way. The last thing that happens is that I come up with the opening line; often in the shower, or while walking the dog.
Today I both showered and walked the dog almost four miles and came up with bupkis.
When this has happened in the past, and I’ve fretted about it to Petey, he’s suggested the opening line seen above. I always laugh, thank him, and tell him I’ll keep it in my back pocket (Care & Feeding of Husbands-Chapter 1.).
And then come up with an actual opener that I use.
But not tonight; so Petey to the rescue.
I do though, have some crazy weather facts about the Lapland region of Sweden that I discovered while doing research for this piece.
Kiruna is in Lapland and the northernmost city in Sweden. It lies ninety miles north of the Arctic Circle. The warmest temp ever recorded was 88.9 (F) degrees, in July 1945. The coldest was -45.9 (F) in January 1999. The sun does not set for the fifty days between May 28th and July 16th and doesn’t rise from December 11th to January 1st (22 days). Yikes.
Now, for the meatballs.
Furniture Store Swedish Meatballs
1 cup homemade white bread crumbs
2 tablespoons butter
1/3 white onion, minced
2 cloves garlic, minced
¼ teaspoon ground allspice
kosher salt, or to taste
¼ teaspoons freshly ground pepper
½ cup milk
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
¾ pound ground veal or turkey
½ pound ground pork
1 large egg, plus 1 egg white, beaten
vegetable oil, for baking sheet
Queen Kristina of Sweden
2 tablespoon butter
2 tablespoon all-purpose flour
1 ½ cup beef stock
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
¼ cup heavy cream
kosher salt to taste
freshly ground black pepper, to taste
For service:
2 tablespoons fresh parsley, chopped
Lingonberry or tart mixed-berry jam
To make meatballs: Put bread crumbs in a large bowl. Heat 2 tablespoons butter in a skillet over medium heat. Add onion, garlic, allspice, 2 teaspoons salt, and 1/4 teaspoon pepper and cook, stirring, until soft, about 5 minutes. Add milk and 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce and bring to a simmer. Pour milk mixture over bread crumbs and stir to make a thick paste (called panade); let cool. Add ground veal or turkey, ground pork, egg and egg white to the bowl and mix until combined. Brush baking sheet with vegetable oil. Scoop meat with small portion scoop, then roll into 1-inch balls and arrange on prepared baking sheet. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.
Not Ikea models. This is the Swedish royal family–honest.
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Bake meatballs for about 20 minutes or until cooked through.
To make gravy: Melt 2 tablespoons butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Add flour and cook, whisking, until smooth. Whisk in beef broth, 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce and bring to simmer. Add heavy cream and meatballs. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until gravy thickens about 10 minutes. Season to taste with salt and black pepper. Transfer to serving dish and sprinkle with the parsley. Serves six.
Serve with a simple starch like egg noodles or mashed potatoes and a dollop of jam. You can also serve on toasted and buttered bread like a split baguette or Texas toast.
Because of the very rich nature of this dish, green vegetables as a side and post-prandial walk are highly recommended by me, your doctor, your arteries, and your Levi’s.
Thanks for your time.
After having to reschedule at least four or five times, the Matthews Family Band finally made it to North Carolina’s little piece of Swedish heaven last week.
The Kid’s been before, and in fact, sleeps on an Ikea bed. Petey and I were both neophytes. I wasn’t expecting much, I mean, it’s a furniture store with meatballs—I’ve shopped for furniture and home goods, and Stouffers make perfectly fine Swedish meatballs.
Mothers: you know how everybody talks about how much labor and childbirth hurt? And how the real thing is so much more painful than your wildest nightmares? Like how there really are no English words that can adequately describe the scorching, soul-eviscerating torment you’ll experience?
The place is huge. This isn’t Target with full grocery store. This is original thirteen colonies huge. The foyer is bigger than an airplane hanger. There’s a nursery/kid jail that’s bigger than your average Chucky Cheese.
Then I found my dream closet. It was more of the Louvre for clothes, shoes, accessories and purses. There was a beautifully upholstered slipper chair and even a glass of Champagne waiting for me on the luxurious dressing table.
And throughout, everything is clean and bright with that Ikea blend of attractive casual yet super chic.
And PS, the meatballs were way better than Stouffer’s.
I’ll explain: (Spoiler alert: it concerns food.)
The recipe calls for a full teaspoon of salt. Most frosting recipes, if they do contain salt it’s barley more than a pinch. In our frosting, you can actually taste the salt, but in most delicious way. For years I’ve been enjoying the current flavor “It” girl of sweet-salty mashups. I’ve been trendy since elementary school and didn’t even know it.
The sweet in this cozy collab brought an unexpected touch of culinary sophistication to the meal. It’s lingonberry jam, which next to Abba and Ikea itself, is Sweden’s most famous export. They have it in the same vessel in which they put mustard and ketchup to dress hot dogs at Costco’s snack bar. 
It’s red, with the translucent sheen of a perfect pigeon-blood ruby, studded with shards of fruit. It’s sweet, with a sourness level comparable to Boysenberry. The flavor’s as if cherry and cranberry made a baby. I like it. I brought home an Ikea-bought jar and have already had a lingonberry and sun butter sandwich on my homemade sourdough—the sandwich’s a keeper. I’m trying it on biscuits next.
I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I loved everything, including the desserts we shared. They have a crispy confection with almond toffee and drenched with milk chocolate ganache called a Daim torte and a treat with layered cream and cake, covered with marzipan that tasted just like bubblegum.
Don’t care, doesn’t matter. I wasn’t a wife and mother of indeterminate heritage eating an early dinner over-looking a parking lot in Charlotte North Carolina.
Thanks for your time.
There’s a piece of mine in the Indy today. With The Kid as designated driver and nursemaid, I drank myself from one end of Downtown Durham to the other–then wrote about it.
In one week, my little brother will be fifty-one(!) years old.
My mom was not on board at first. But we liked it, and it was our special little tradition. In three years, the first bill got filled up, so we just took a new Monopoly C-note and stapled it to the first. This year is the fourteenth year. Other than a kinda sweet, kinda sappy sibling tradition thing, I love it for a far more important reason.
Each year we try to find cards that are so rude (Not dirty, just extra snarky), the only person you could send it to is a sibling—they already know you’re a jerk. Shoot, they had a hand in molding your clay into jerk-like form.
Shows how much he knows; my mustache has gone gray, so I don’t have to wax it anymore.
I had a few lessons in twirling, but I was never very good at. It did come in useful when I wanted to whack something or someone on the head—not to hurt them, just to get their attention.
When I was in college, I had some minor surgery. One evening my folks came to visit me in the hospital, having left my fourteen-year-old brother at home. The next night when they visited, they told me that the mirror in the bathroom my brother and I shared had shattered. Nobody knew what had happened, but it was completely busted when they got home.
“Were you trying to make a blow torch?”
Thanks for your time.
My brilliant idea kind of all started when I inadvertently found a new treat for my Whirlpool-sized pooch, Crowley.
On the other hand, freeze-dried fruit is completely desiccated. The process is known as lyophilization. Think the crispy, crumbly Styrofoam-like food sold in camping and survival stores and used by NASA and the military. What I had scored on the sale shelf was freeze-dried peaches.
They were like the taste of every peach I’d ever eaten. Every can of fruit cocktail, every bowl of cobbler, every Hostess fruit pie had combined to create this huge peach punch to my taste buds. One bite was my limit.
Which is brilliant, because you get buckets of taste and also as a bonus, it becomes a gorgeous heliotrope color.
Instead of plain jam added to the frosting, I added only two tablespoons of jam, and also a couple tablespoons of finely crushed strawberries. It lowered the amount of liquid I needed to use, and made the frosting less likely to get soft and run if the cake was in a warm environment. I also added a couple tablespoons of the crushed berries to the cake crumbs that I pressed into the sides of the cake. This turned the crumbs a really pretty, springy shade of pink; almost Barbie-ville.
Compound butter. Last week I talked about flavored butter and encouraged imagination and experimentation. So, imagine making a fruit compound butter. What about apples and cinnamon? For those of you with death defying taste buds, how about habañero/mango? Here’s one: An Elvis; freeze-dried bananas, finely chopped peanuts, and crushed crispy bacon.
Thanks for your time.
The first time I met the man, it cleared up one mystery. The second time, it initiated another mystery that’s never been solved.
Mostly, I’m the lone human of the forest. So one day when I saw an ATV half hidden out there, it made me very curious. I was sure I was alone. Had it been stolen? Where was the owner? Was he ok?
But as he approached me, he stopped. And he asked me for a word.
“My friend’s father does. I look after it, and he lets me hunt back here. When you’re here you disturb the deer with your white hat.” The way he said hat, it was like I was wearing rabid badgers on my head. For some reason, he really hated my simple white baseball cap.
“Every time we put ‘em up, someone pulls ‘em down.”
After a couple hours of research, I discovered the man’s name and eventually found a phone number. I gave him a call. I explained who I was, where I lived, and asked if there was any way, under any conditions, I could keep going.
He didn’t have a son and there was no friend looking after the woods. Not only was I very welcome to visit his forest, he absolutely did not want somebody back there hunting.
Finally, he rode up on his ATV. He looked like he was going to scold me for coming back, but I didn’t give him the chance. I told him about my conversation with the owner.
Then he rode off and I never saw him again.
But there are two things about me he didn’t know.
Thanks for your time.
When the rich and famous are interviewed, very often they say the best thing about fame is the people they meet.
Trucks full of money? Oh no.
But people? Yeah, sure.
Just about five years ago, I was in line at Costco, and met the sweetest couple, Victoria and Jefe. They were Puerto Ricans and wonderful cooks of the island’s cuisine. I went to their house for a cooking lesson for the column, and we became friends.
They very much remind me of my parents, whose own generosity is legendary. Once they took me under their wing and decided to be my Caribbean God Parents, they went all in. We meet for coffees and I almost have to wrestle Jefe to let me pay once in a while. Every holiday that rolls around I have an adorable greeting note and gif in my email. They shower me with tons of homemade Puerto Rican foods and extravagant gifts.
So, as often as I can, I make food gifts for them. They’ve had my famous five-chocolate brownies, my brown butter chocolate chips cookies, and my mom’s magically addictive Christmas cookies.
It’s what is known as a compound butter. It can be one of your most versatile ingredients in the kitchen. The butter I made for Jefe and Victoria can be used on toast. But it would also go great on carrots, sweet potatoes, anything with warm sweetish flavors. Schmear it all over a ham biscuit.
I’ll give you the recipe for the butter. But what I’d like to have happen is for your imagination to be inspired. Use the butter on something new. Even something as simple as tweaking the proportions of the recipe I give you. Get in your kitchen and mad scientist some new butters.
A compound butter is kind of like Me
Take these butter ideas and run with them. Use the flavors that you and your family love. Then put the butter on all kinds of interesting foods.
Many of you know that Petey, The Kid, and I call Durham home.
My father’s horse, named Macho (Spanish slang for arrogant, extra strength, manly man), wasn’t very tall, but he was sturdy, and built like a dump truck. He was also quite beautiful; chestnut brown with black socks on all four feet. His mane was black, thick and stood straight up.
The general consensus around the base’s ranch, Lazy R, was that he’d been badly gelded. So badly that it never even occurred to him that he was, in fact, a gelding.
Except in the case of hurricanes, the horses were always pastured at Lazy R. When we went to the ranch, we’d grab some halters and leads, then go out into the pasture and bring out our horses.
Macho and I were friends. I adored him, and that half-stallion was firmly convinced that all the attention and affection I gave him was absolutely his due. One night he actually fell asleep with his head on my shoulder as I rubbed his neck and spoke quietly to him.
Usually, as I approached our horses and called to them, they’d walk up and stand patiently while I hooked them into their halters. Then we’d go on to the next horse and repeat until I had all three and we walked out of the pasture to the corral for food and grooming. Like I said, usually.
Macho was the first horse I got to that day. He was surrounded by his mares, and looking like he was feeling especially stallion-y. Really keyed up and full of himself. Ominously, he didn’t approach me, but backed up a few steps.
Horses will not run over a human. It may look like they’re going to, but they will veer off at the last second. So, I stood still waiting for him to run past, then I’d hook him up, and go after the next one.
He knocked me down, ran over my prone body, stepped right on that hollow where the collar bone meets the shoulder, and got in one last insult when a hoof flipped up and smacked me right on top of my skull (there is still a horse hoof-shaped indentation on my melon). He then turned around and calmly walked back over to his pasture groupies. 
It was weeks before I went into the pasture by myself.
Thanks for your time.
bull city mom 