Ground beef

My freezer is stuffed to the max and I'm tired of things tumbling out when I open it so I pulled out a package of ground chuck with no immediate plan for it.

Now what am I going to do?

Howzabout Swedish meatballs. Is that even a real thing? A secretary told me they haven't any such thing in Sweden. And this whole time I thought it was one of those things we named for some place fancier than ourselves. But turns out they do have Swedish meatballs in Sweden.

I read Alton Brown's recipe and it sounds terrible. Way too plain. The meatballs are not so bad, ground beef and ground sausage, bread and milk, egg yolks, onion, and mild spices, but the gravy is boring, a plain veloute type made with beef broth but no herbs, no Worcestershire, no soy, no spice to redeem it.

Comments confirm. People love it for its plainness. Others don't like it for its plainness. Others love it for the changes they made to make them less plain. Others are just goofing around; I changed the beef to buffalo, the beef broth to Aqua Vitae, changed the onions to beets, included 50% yams, and changed the egg yolks to a stop sign. It tasted okay, but a little too crunchy. The Food Network, that place kills me.. 

The  second site that I looked at is graced with deplorably colored photographs that make the meatballs look the color of SOS. The meatballs are the same thing, the gravy is an improved version with flavors. It's a sensible approach.

The third site has "Svenska Kottbullar" in its title and that influenced me into thinking its authentic. It's the same thing. They specify day old white bread, see, a recipe for stale bread and I love that. It will absorb the milk better, and one whole egg, not just the egg yolks like Alton Brown says.

I type Svenska Kottbullar into the search window and that site ↑ is top of results.

The next site tells much more about them. I feel like I'm listening to my friend from Sweden. She talks like this.

Sidetrack. This woman worked at the FRB with me. She was broadly recognized as an impossible hard ass and very difficult to work with, well nigh impossible. The women I worked with did not like her for being way too demanding. She wanted to know every little thing about every little detail about every little aspect of the work we did for her department. She ruled! So I thought, how can I improve this soured and  harsh relationship? I know. I'll out-bug the living piss out of her. I'll call her to discuss every living detail, every update, every stage of progress regarding her supplies and her purchases, everywhere we overlap, I'll over-communicate with her. I'll do her paperwork for her so everything is ready, I'll get her signatures for her. I'll be on the phone reporting absolutely every stage of processing. I will bug the living piss out of her until she tells me to slow down. I'll make her tired of dealing with me the way she makes my coworkers tired. I'll get her to the point she answers the phone, "you again." But that never happened. She loved it. It proved that she really mattered to us. We developed a very unique relationship based on our intense concern for things like copy paper and specific pens, the time of their ordering, the time of their arrival, the time of their delivery, and the like. It became a fun game, a lovely precise and measured way to behave.

The first time I was admitted to hospital the situation was dire. She sent the most beautiful vase of flowers. But I never saw them. I was told about them later. My parents did their best to protect me in their own way. The woman chose a stunning black vase in modern design. My parents thought the black color too reminiscent of funerals.

!

They were weirdly confused sometimes. They didn't want me to see the black vase. Because I was too near death for anything black.  So I never saw the flowers my friend from Sweden sent me. What a bummer! This came out as I was reading cards sent by FRB workers. I was amazed what people told me when they were certain I was dying. They reached deeply and pulled out their most heart wrenching sentiments. They really thought about what they would say to me. Both my parents were sobbing as I read through them aloud. All along I had no idea these were the things they were thinking. So many said that they had to have me know certain particular things that they felt. Bankers are left-brain, so nearly any right-brain activity impresses them inordinately. The artistic things impressed them. One woman said I convinced her to go to college by simply talking about how exactly step-by-step to overcome fear of it. Just go there and take one class to scope out the place. That did it. Now she's graduated. Because of me. Another bank analyst wrote that he noticed me speaking French to the Vietnamese workers, Spanish to Mexican workers and sign language to deaf employees, having all three groups teach me, and having lunch with the black secretaries that he cannot even approach, and speaking with ease to all the vice presidents and to the janitors with the same respect and he admired that and he hoped to model his own communication style on what he saw me doing. Each sympathy card blew us away. Each card contained some intensely tender sentiment. These cards are my treasure. I've saved them these many years. Among them was one from the hard-ass Swedish secretary who told me they don't have any such thing in Sweden as what the cafeteria called Swedish meatballs. She explained to me how she makes meatballs. In her card she said I was the one person there she truly enjoyed working with. I am the one person who understood and accepted her.

So they're basically combined meatballs in beef gravy similar to beef Stroganoff but less spicy.

The address of the next site ends in .se so this must be totally authentic. It begins, "Swedish meatballs, or köttbullar, must be prepared, above all, with love." *eeeerk, slams brakes* Stop reading.

Ever hear anything so stupid?

I hear it all the time on t.v. "Mom's fried chicken is the best because of her secret ingredient."

"Oh yeah? What's that?"

"L-o-o-o-o-o-v-e."

"Right."

I was intending on making my meatballs with detached professionalism. I had meant to make meatballs with sublime intuition developed from experience. I was going to make them with mathematic precision based on previous calculations and fine-tuning. With awareness of the season, of varying intensities of natural ingredients, and varying percentages of fat, of the effects of marketing, transportaion, storage, and terroir. I planned on programming a robot to do this. This love thing interferes with my whole approach.

I love you egg, crack splat, I love you dead meat, squish squish, I love you dried bread and milk. I love you blender, I love you pan. I love you pepper, shake shake shake. I love the people who's gonna eat this even though I don't know them. I love being here in the kitchen making stuff.

I have no idea what they said on that site after the first line. My Archie Bunker prejudicial bias prevented me from reading it.

The next site has IKEA in the title, so now, here we are at Sweden in America. Possibly Holland in America. This is what they say is Swedish meatballs to all their hundreds of thousands of customers. I've never been there so I'm curious about this. The picture shows attractive light brown glistening gravy meatball on mashed potatoes. The writer really doesn't like to touch raw meat and they won't eat anything they cannot recognize and they won't eat anything they cannot pronounce. The recipe is sensible and straightforward, ingredients common to all the others, clarified butter, egg yolks, allspice, nutmeg, beef broth veloute gravy finished with heavy cream. Just like all the others.

I thought it would be from IKEA directly, but it is an imitation of what is seen at IKEA. I guess.

Well, here it is, today's meal sorted.

The whole effort reminded me of a very fine little book, now out of print. You can find it everywhere at very low price. It is a book on French cooking. The twist is, it's a book about attitude. And the author is not French. He's Polish. He lived in France, his real job something else, a radio engineer, or something like that, but he liked to cook and he adopted a French attitude that the French themselves adored. He was a very good reflection of themselves. They liked what they saw of themselves in him. He was a hit on the radio talking about his cavalier approach to French style and French cooking.

He said, "When you come home for lunch put a pot of water on the stove to heat up first thing. Even if you have no idea what you intend to do. Because whatever you do will most likely involve a pot of boiling water. So get that started first."

It's a small book. You can read the whole thing in an hour.

I bought several copies and handed them out. The women I gave the book to told me they like it a lot. I enjoyed reading it. It's simple and it can change your own attitude permanently. You know, take the pressure off. A bit like the Deplorable Cookbook from Ace except with a lot better ingredients, all those tins of things are nonexistent. 

He has a recipe for bitocks à la russe. That's meatballs as Russians do. I like that he specifies to smash them a bit so they fry on two sides like small slider hamburgers. Instead of rolling them around in a pan trying to get them to brown on all sides as spheres. 

I made them one time. 

When it comes to meatballs, you can do anything that you like.