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.
