A lazy cook—and Swedish meatballs

 

Reluctantly I admit that I am in many ways a lazy cook. There are simply kitchen chores I don’t want to deal with—chopping onions comes to mind, and I am eternally grateful to the grandson who doesn’t like onions because now I can omit them a lot of the time. Peeling garlic is another bothersome chore—those silvery skins are hard to get off and they stick everywhere. Yes, I know about garlic presses that work without peeling—except they don’t work as well, and I prefer to microplane garlic into a lot of recipes. And don’t get me started on snobs who eschew cooking with canned soups—I do it all the time, and the results are usually great.

So one of the things I rarely do is make meatballs because it is a real pain to brown those tiny things on all sides in a skillet. Too time consuming, too boring. But I’d been wanting Swedish meatballs, and I found the perfect recipe: you essentially dump everything into a big bowl and mix it as though you were making a meatloaf. Then you shape the meatballs—okay, that’s drudgery but not too bad—and bake them. No skillet required.

Swedish meatballs, as I alluded to last night, are milder, made of pork and beef and seasoned with the warm spices such as nutmeg and allspice. They are traditionally served with lingonberry jelly but that somehow didn’t appeal to me, so I made a simple white sauce—and then decided I like the meatballs better without the sauce.

But here’s what I mixed and did.

Swedish meatballs

1 lb. ground chuck

1 lb. ground pork

3 c. Panko

1-1/2 c. whole milk

2 large eggs, beaten

2 garlic cloves, microplaned into the meat mixture

1 Tbsp. salt

½ tsp. black pepper (I prefer fine ground)

¼ tsp. ground allspice

¼ tsp. ground nutmeg

Dump all the above ingredients into a mixing bowl, wash your hands, and dig in, mixing until everything is thoroughly integrated. You don’t want to overwork the mixture, but at the same time you don’t want pockets of breadcrumbs.

Use a Tbsp. measure to scoop out meat and create meatballs. Roll each meatball in your palms until it is firm—okay, this part is a bit of a pain. The recipe is supposed to make 48 meatballs. I didn’t count but I had at least that many, and I learned two lessons about cooking in my toaster oven. When the directions say to set your oven to 475^o the oven will only go to 450^o. So when it said to bake for 10-12 minutes, I left them for 15, which may be why they had a crust.

And the wonderful rimmed baking sheet that fits my oven does not hold 24 meatballs. I made three trays full, baking one and letting it cool; then filling the second, baking it and letting it cool, etc. I have to add a word about the baking sheet—it came from Williams Sonoma and was given me by a friend, and it is indestructible. After three trays of meatballs, it was greasy and crusted and awful. I soaked it for a couple of hours, and it came clean right away. Easy peasy.

So there I was with more meatballs than we’d ever eat in a meal. I made a white sauce, following the directions, but it kept thickening up and never was as thin as I’d like. My take? Meatballs were better without the sauce. In case you want to do it, here are the proportions for the white sauce:

3 Tbsp. butter

1/3 c. flour

1 cup milk

           Not near enough milk, probably too much flour. I wasn’t happy with it. Even adding white wine didn’t help.

But the meatballs themselves were great—crusty (which I don’t think Swedish meatballs are meant to be) with good flavor. I just happened to eat about six as I cooked—that was lunch. Tonight, we had them for supper with asparagus.

And that sweet fourteen-year-old came out to the cottage just now and asked, “Can I have that last cookie?” It was a large chocolate chip cookie that came with a to-go order last night. What grandmother could refuse. I told him to enjoy, and he grinned and said, “I will.”