Swedish meatballs

It may sound sad but I love IKEA no matter what other people say about this Swedish furniture company. Probably I am not the only one considering the fact it has 231 stores in 24 countries now. (Yes, I had to check it on their website. I'm this sad!) For me, the attraction of IKEA is not only their furniture or the way they display them cleverly although I tend to spend hours and hours just wandering about in the store like many others. I also like the IKEA FOOD. I would never leave the IKEA store without buying loads of goodies from Swedish Food Market, especially the IKEA meatballs (Kottbullar) and all the trimmings - cream sauce (Graddas) & lingonberry jam (Lingonsylt). Yummy! I think they are the best meatballs I have ever had. (I know it's ready made ones but I'm not ready for making my own meatballs yet. Not just yet!) Since they are frozen, you can keep them in the freezer for quite a while, which is handy.

We normally have meatballs with mashed potato and sauerkraut as well as cream sauce and lingonberry jam. Being a Scot, Rob prefers mashed potato to boiled potatoes. As for sauerkraut, I know perfectly well that it is German not Swedish. One time we had to substitute the pickled red cabbage from IKEA with this German version since it was out of stock. Luckily its sharper taste worked very well with the rest. So there we go. Even without microwave oven, it only takes 15 minutes to cook the meatballs in the oven. You can make the mash and the cream sauce while they are being cooked. So quick and simple!

Sadly we finished the last bag of meatballs tucked in our freezer last Sunday. As we don't have any plans to visit IKEA any time soon, I think I am going to miss the tasty meatballs for a while. Still I have to say I was quite pleased to share the last meatballs with J, my friend.

Ready to cook...

... and ready to eat!!! (On this occasion we also had to

substitute lingonberry jam with the red current jelly.)

Friend's visit

J - one of my Korean friends is currently staying with us for a few weeks. We had met each other when we were doing our course at the University here. One of the reasons we became close was that we shared the love of food and the willingness to try new food stuff. For example, she was the only other Korean who liked Marmite apart from me. The main difference between her and me is the size, I guess. Whereas I'm very tall, J is tiny (& cute I may add) and naturally eats only a small amount of food. Unfortunately for me, she now lives in Korea and is only visiting the UK for a couple of months.

Thanks to her, we have been having lots of Korean food recently. Nothing grand or special but just simple dishes. Luckily, this suits fine all three of us. My husband loves Korean food, especially Kimchi or anything spicy. Like most Koreans, my friend seems to prefer Korean diet to western. A lot healthier arguably. Sensible girl! And me? As I said, I am quite happy with any sorts of food and I don't mind cooking either. The only trouble is that I am very very slow and tend to panic if the task looks slightly daunting. As a result, I tend to stick to a handful of recipes I feel comfortable with. Very bad! I know. Good news is that J is a lot quicker and more confident in cooking and with her help, I have been practising some other Korean dishes. I am sure that there will be another handful of Korean recipes in my collection by the end of her stay.