Ikeaaaa meatballs, tasty

Steph and I made our quarterly trip to Ikea to check out the new catalog stuff and wander the store and pretty much be terrible people. I'm trying to outfit an office out of a spare room and wanted to test drive their sofa bed stuff.

ANYWAY, these trips always wind up with us taking home a bag of meatballs.

I suck, once more, at the picture taking before devouring food - but this recipe is for the cream gravy. Not the packet from Ikea.


You need:

1 tablespoon of oil
1 bag of Ikea Meatballs
1 onion - chopped
garlic - however much you like. start with two cloves minced
1 T butter
1/2 cup of flour
2 or so cups of milk
beef bouillon cubes to taste, start with one or two
1 T dill
pinch coriander
salt pepper

Take large pan. Add a tablespoon of oil. Heat. Add meatballs, frozen is okay. Brown.

As they brown, juices come out. Add a chopped up onion.

Add a few chopped up cloves of garlic. Fry till onion translucent.

Add a tablespoon of butter and half a cup of flour.

stir until everything is pretty much covered in buttery flour.

Add two cups of milk. Maybe 2 and a half. depending on how thick you like your gravy. Sometimes I want gravy. Sometimes I want sauce. Stir and bring just to a boil

I add a couple of beef bouillon cubes and a tablespoon of dill and salt and pepper and a little coriander.

simmer until everyone's ready to eat. Honestly, you can just kind of let this one sit around a bit and the sauce gets beefier. Serve over pasta or rice or with potatoes or you know. Whatever. And of course you can do this with homemade meatballs, but it's Ikea day.

Maybe I will take a picture of the leftovers if I remember before I eat them.

Breakfast for dinner

It was just one of those days.

Charoses sausage (Pork, apple, walnut, cinnamon and sweet red wine) from this really lovely man at the farmer's market in midtown. 2 egg omelette Julia Child style (beaten eggs with a little salt and pepper and milk, poured into a hot nonstick pan and shaken like a polaroid picture) (shake it. shake. ..ok I'm done) The how to is here! And cut up sweet potato from the CSA.

I browned the sausage, and then dumped the chunked sweet potato in the fats and juices of the sausage. The sweet potato chunks get caramelized and then the whole mess gets covered. It steams in the juice of the sausages and the small chunks cook quickly. It all finishes at about the same time.

A new ...leaf?

A friend commented that we should post our more vegetarian friendly recipes - it's true. Our more grand food schemes tend to involve meat. And I tend to lean on cheeses a LOT.

Challenge for today was a vegany dish with not very much prep time and well. Not much in the fridge. BUT, I did have a CSA box that came with a bunch of nummies including a few organic lemons and a bunch of parsley. Also, it's Houston and it's flipping hot.

Took half an onion and a few carrots and cooked them on high until they were all nice and brown. While those did their dansen I boiled a couple of cups of israeli couscous.

Here's the trick. after draining the hot couscous, add one pressed/minced/beaten to death clove of garlic while still hot. dump the hot carrots and onions in there too. That'll take the edge off the garlic.

Added a couple of glugs of olive oil and the juice and zest of a lemon, a little salt and pepper and a generous chopped handful of parsley.



It's tasty and tangy and if you have good parsley, green. Really good cold too. I wish I had time to soak beans because chickpeas would go really well with this too in order to make it a more complete dish.

And you know what. After a few bites, I remembered I had some chevre from The Blue Heron Farm and added a chunk to the salad. I am a failure at the veganism, but man. Those happy pampered goats and their mom make some incredible cheese.