Last weekend we took a ride down to the monstrously huge IKEA store in Stoughton, which is just a bit south of Boston. We live north-west of the city, just far enough away from IKEA that it has to be a small adventure to go, but the reward for our intrepidness (intrepidity?) is usually working our way through the cafeteria line to sit down at a tastefully modern table to eat a big ol’ plate of Swedish Meatballs with mashed potatoes and a little dollop of lingonberry jam, have a slice of the apple cake, and wash it all down with as much lingonberry juice drink as our stomachs can hold. Thus fortified with what is undoubtedly the exact same menu that fueled the savage Viking raids that terrorized Northern Europe for centuries, we can return to ogling inexpensive DIY plywood furniture with hysterically funny Swedish names. This time through, however, we’d actually started the morning with a substantial brunch and were still digesting our omelets and pancakes when we reached the aircraft-carrier-sized building, so we skipped our usual repast and instead bought the frozen meatballs, packets of sauce mix, and jars of lingonberry jam that they so cleverly place right on your way out the door, and had it all for Sunday night dinner instead (except for the lingonberry juice beverage, which they don’t seem to sell, more’s the pity).
Reheating meaty treats has never been what I consider “cooking”, but last week there was this post at Serious Eats, where the author, site contributor Michele Humes, brought home not just the meatballs and sauce packet, but several of the other food items that you can buy in the “Bistro” section of the store, and then used them to make dishes other than Swedish Meatballs. Now, spaghetti and meatballs is a little obvious, I think, but she also came up with cocktail sausages glazed with lingonberry jam, some pinwheel hors d’oeuvres made with crab pate and lumpfish caviar on flatbread, and some unfortunate looking herring in dill mayonnaise on burnt rye bread. She even made some mashed potato puffs and floated them on a bed of Swedish Meatball gravy.
Look, there’s a reason the Vikings raped and pillaged every coastal town from Ireland to Spain and back again, and it wasn’t because they couldn’t wait to get home for the food. But this shows that a little ingenuity can go a long way, even when all you have are Kötbullar and Gräddsås.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
Ooooo they usually sell bottles of the lingonberry as concentrate and you make your own juice. We have never actually eaten IN an Ikea, but we always buy the balls, and sauce for later imbibing. It’s one of my most secret lame-o loves.
They have, in a pinch been made into “sweedish” meetballs for a family function with the addition of scary things like grape jelly and BBQ sauce….don’t ask.
I only go for the salty chocolate balls. ;-)
We’re big IKEA foodies too :). Susan spent days gathering up all the nutrition info for her article http://www.ikeafans.com/ikea/ikea-corporate/ikea-food-nutritional-information.html and blog post http://www.ikeafans.com/blog/category/ikea-stores/ikea-restaurant/.
It’s amazing how hard it was to round up all the info! Our daughter loves the salads, but that’s mainly ’cause she has a weakness for garbanzo beans. Best deal is definitely the $.99 breakfast and free coffee if you get there before the store itself opens! The Swedish Pancakes, AKA crepes, are pretty tasty too, esp with everyone’s fav lingonberry sauce :-).
Excellent links, James. Give Susan my thanks for doing such a bang-up job on the nutritional information.