Dish up swedish meatballs as you learn about Sweden

In our cooking around the world adventures for our geography lessons this month is SWEDEN!  I theoretically have Swedish ancestors, but aside from a 4th grade report on Sweden, I don’t know too much.

So naturally I went to IKEA for some Sweden inspiration…….

And after much playing in the various “houses,” I found my inspiration:

Swedish Meatballs!  Almost everyone in my family loves them.  I’m horrible at making them (My one attempt as a newly wed ended up with softball-sized meatballs that needless to say were burned on the outside and raw on the inside, it was not pretty).  So, why not?

Swedish meatball recipes

I found a recipe at Simply Recipes and got started since I really didn’t stick to the recipe I’ll give you my version.

1/2 yellow onion chopped up really small
quart size ziploc bag stuffed full of tortilla chips (this would be where I improvised, their recipe said bread crumbs)
2 eggs
1 pound sausage
1 pound hamburger meat
discover there’s no nutmeg, cardamom like you thought you had, so substitute 1 teaspoon dill mixture  (only to find the nutmeg the next day)
1 teaspoon black pepper

1.  Take your bag of chips and pound them into submission with your meat mallet.  Once they’re the consistency of crumbs add them in with the sausage and the pork.
2.  Smash together the meat, chopped onion, and the chip crumbs.  I found my Pampered Chef Pastry Cutter to work great for this type of mixing. [Future Ticia here, I have since broke that one, it’s like the fifth one I’ve broken in my 15 years of marriage, and am currently using a cheap pastry cutter like this*, I like the rounded edges because I’ve cut my fingers on the sharp blades several times)
3.  Add the eggs and your spices.  Smush it up some more (yes smush is a word).
4.  Make sure their hands are well washed (yes Princess go wash them now), and form the meatballs into little balls.
5.  Bake at 400 for 10 minutes or so.  If they’re not all the way done they’ll finish in the sauce.

Swedish meatballs sauce recipe

6 tablespoons butter
1/3 cup flour
1 quart beef stock
1/2 to 3/4 cup of sour cream (I probably used closer to 1 cup, that was my container size)

1.  Melt the butter, when the butter is melted add in the flour.  Let that saute for a little bit.  The website gives a very precise definition of what it should look like.  My flour was an odd mixture of white and whole wheat, so it didn’t look like the pictures did.
2.  Add in the beef stock and let it simmer down.  Here’s where I went wrong.  I misremembered how much a quart is and added in roughly twice the amount of beef broth.  Big soupy mess that just wasn’t really boiling down.
3.  Eventually add in the sour cream and just pretend I meant to make soup.

Serve with meatballs, hot egg noodles, and sauce.  It got a rousing cheer from the monsters, so all is well.
Then write your post and realize you never got a good picture of the cooked Swedish meatballs, sigh, it’s just not my day for sharing a recipe.

To explain the thumbs up and down.  They all agreed the meatballs were good, the sauce was mostly good, but the boys did not like the linginberry jelly I had them all try.  That got a thumbs down.

Stay tuned, and hopefully I’ll get some super cute Dala horse cookies made, fingers crossed. [Future Ticia, that so didn’t happen. The recipe was so complicated that five years later I still haven’t tried them.]