JGE 3 - Jim's Gotta Eat - Swedish Meatballs on Pasta

Good Day,

From IKEA there is a bag of Swedish meatballs, sans horse-meat, in the freezer. It just so happens that there is also a jar of Lingonberry preserves in the refrigerator.  Therefore obviously for supper, I decide that I need to make Swedish meatballs without making the meatballs, since they're quite conveniently and already made. And I want Swedish meatballs for supper.

At IKEA the fare-de-chaque-jour is typically Swedish Meatballs and Mashed Potatoes. Well, the IKEA mashed potatoes taste good, but they're awful loose.   That is, they are too much like wall-paper paste, for my liking. But I really don't think I want to go to the effort of boiling potatoes and waiting the almost 25 minutes for them to cook and then mashing them etc., etc., etc.


So how about Swedish meatballs on pasta? Swedish meatballs on wide egg noodle pasta. There's a bag of those in the pantry.  (I never really know what lurks and I've tucked away in the pantry in this house.)

So my ingredients at this juncture are - frozen Swedish meatballs, Lingonberry preserves, and wide egg noodle pasta. All I need is the sauce. And that should be relatively easy to put together. This is a perfect quick supper – all things being equal, and one that I don't have to think too much about.

So now I can grab the ingredients to make the sauce. I need flour, butter, beef broth, and some sour cream. Well, I don't have any sour cream in the fridge but there is a half-full container of Kefir cheese.  Why not? I also want to add some onion. One small onion chopped up finely.

Pot on the stove, I throw in six tablespoons of butter and melt them down. Next, I add the chopped onion and cook until they're translucent. That simply means until they are sort of like see-through. I then add one third-of-a-cup of flour and mix the onion butter mixture with the flour.  After a couple of minutes I start pouring in the beef broth while whisking to make sure that the sauce is nice and smooth. The recipe that I found asked for 4 cups of beef broth, but I found that it was much better with only three. Once the sauce is thickened to my liking, I turned the stove burner down to simmer.

In the meantime, I've had a pot of salted water boiling so that I can cook the wide egg noodle pasta. And at the same time I've been sort of defrosting and cooking the Swedish meatballs in the microwave. The type that come from IKEA are frozen and pre-cooked so it's just an easy reheat and warm them up.

I drain the pasta, put it on the plate, throw on the meatballs and ladled some sauce all over. I make sure that there is a heaping tablespoon of Lingonberry preserves.

I also add a quick salad of young greens and capers, drizzled with olive oil and caper vinegar.  And I go to town… and eat.

Obviously this didn't take too much time to create a generous dinner of Swedish meatballs on pasta accompanied with Lingonberry preserves and a salad. I definitely am channeling the Swedish Chef.

Be healthy and enjoy,

Jim