So HP asked a valid question, taht I think I should post, so you IKEA shoppers know how to do things correctly:
"They had a sale on the meatballs, lingonberry sauce and 2 packets of gravy for ~$12. Are all these ingredients supposed to be made into a special dish together?"
My response:
Traditionally, Swedes eat potatoes everyday. My dad has eaten potatoes every single day since at least 1950. I know this because he constantly reminded me when we tried to convince him that rice would go better with some dish my step mom had cooked, and he just said: "Blaaagh! I will eat my potatoes, and make enough for more than just me, because you will see that potatoes is the way to go."
[Side note: I grew up in Mexico, and my step mom is Mexican]
It kind of became a joke to try and get him to not eat potatoes, but he would regardless of the dish, throw some potatoes in a frying pan with a little butter and fry them up till golden brown. He'd then have a little bowl to the side with his potatoes while we ate rice or whatever...
(Yes, he just needed to throw them in the frying pan, because my dad will boil up about 10-15lbs of potatoes at a time. He'll then peel them and put them in containers in the fridge. He'd then simply, take some out, cut them up into 1 inch cubes, and throw them in the frying pan for 10 mins or so, to get some golden brown crunchy edges on them)
Why am I telling you this... well, you need to buy potatoes. Just the plain white ones, and boil them up till their done. Then, you fry the meatballs, (fry as in frying pan with a little butter or PAM - not Deep fry!) Make the gravy, and serve the three separately. Load up your plate with the stuff, but you do not mix it all together.
Then, as a true Swede, you grab some lingonberry sauce and put a little on your plate.
You then do the stack method on your fork: Stab a piece of potato, then a piece of meatball (or a whole meatball if you like, but you stab the potatoe first, because it's easier to stab a meatball after a potato than the other way around).
Then take a little bit of lingonberry sauce with your knife, plaster it to the potato and meatball, then do the same with the gravy, or you can just dip the fork in the gravy. (it's ok, to douse the potatos and meatballs with gravy instead of putting it on the side!)
I'm personally not a huge fan of lingonberry sauce so I really just have a couple of fork fulls that way, but overall, I prefer just the meatball and the potatoes with gravy.
That's the way a Swede would do it!
And that is what I grew up on.
Another funny fact is how my dad makes meatballs. Swedish meatballs, as KP and HP will see, are a little smaller than a Ping Pong ball. My dad would easily make three to four hundred meatballs and then freeze them in different sized ziplock bags. He keeps count of how many he puts in each bag and write it on the ziplock with a sharpie. This way he knows exactly how many bags he needs to pull out depending on how many people he's feeding. I can't tell you how many times I've called him over the years since I moved away to college in 1990, and he's said: "We made 373 meat balls today." (or whatever the count was for the session!)
** When I was a kid, I'd skip the gravy all together, and just plaster ketchup the the meatball and potato instead. **
3 comments:
I've submitted this to digg.com under the heading "Candidate for One of the Top Ten Best Advice Columns In a Mexican-Swedish-Austinite Runner's Blog On a Monday In August" under the sub-category "IKEA Frozen Foods." Thanks Mike!
What the heck is lingoberry? Is that what Jingobingo puts on the grits?
When I was in Sweden the very best dish I had was Reindeer with gravy and lingonberry sauce. It was fantastic, but I felt a little sick when I found out it was Reindeer. Lulu - lingonberries are little red berries & it's kind of tart, like cranberry sauce so it cuts the savory flavor of the gravy.
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