Norwegian Dishes - Norwegian Meat-balls

Consider this a cautionary tale of the dangers of not respecting authority, and following directions.  I blatantly disregarded the wisdom of one of the Ladies, Mrs. Gust Haugen, who gave us such classics as Carrot Ring (*hork*) and Cabbage Rolls, by not reading all the way through the recipe before getting started and by missing the time listed to finish the recipe.  Ok, so maybe it's not a particularly exciting or suspenseful story and its one I've been a part of many times, so you'd think it would be a lesson learned for me.  But I guess I don't operate like that.

Once upon a time, in a land not far from here on a Monday not long ago, a dad had to make dinner.  Meatballs!  Meatballs will be a great dinner.  He had a recipe for meatballs that includes a gravy, "I'll cook up some kind of vegetable to go with them,and we'll have a great meal," he said.  "What could go wrong?  Nothing!  I'll even plan ahead."  This is where things took a turn for the worse.  And by worse, I actually mean better... sort of.

Ok, I can't keep that up.  Too much work.

So, meatballs.  Norwegian meatballs.  Whoever heard of Norwegian meatballs?  Doesn't Ikea have a patent on any and all Scandinavian balls of meat?

It certainly looks that way.  I guess even Martha had to pay up.

I guess the Ladies probably didn't have an IKEA to go to to get their meatballs, and this wasn't a time too far removed from Swedish/Norwegian animosity.

No, 46 years isn't very long at all.

Norwegian/Swedish animosity certainly was a part of my family history.  I don't remember the whole story, but as I recall it had to do with my great grandparents on my mother's side.  They lived in Fargo, and the Swedish son taking a Norwegian bride caused no small trouble for his family.  Correct me if I'm wrong, family, but I think his family came from a line of relatively prosperous merchants or maybe even lesser nobility in Sweden.  Her family, however.  Well, does it even matter?  She was Norwegian!  His mother, my great great grandmother, apparently wouldn't even let her new daughter-in-law into the house.  The porch was close enough, thank you very much!  I don't imagine my great great grandmother would have troubled with Norwegian meatballs.

The Ladies of Zion, however, had no problems with them.  Me?  Well, yeah, there are some problems, but we'll get to that.

Preparation

I almost did the sandbakkels, but they weren't like MY sandbakkel recipe.  Harumph!

So here's the deal.  I thought I'd save all this time by pre-mixing the meatballs and then just finish cooking them up after I pick up the boys from pre-school.  If we got home by 4:30, the meatballs would be done before too long, and we'd all be able to sit down to a nice dinner together.  Right?  That's the plan at least.

Easy peasy meaty squeezy

I wound up going with simple ground beef and ground pork after talking to a woman at our local chain butcher.  She said that ground round steak and ground pork steak wouldn't be significantly different from simple ground beef and pork.  Maybe to the refined meat-eater, it would make a difference, but I don't eat enough meat to care too much about that.  So this is what we're going with.

I tossed the bread in the food processor (love that thing!), and threw it in with the milk and other non-meat ingredients.

Yum yum

Then it was time to add the meat and squish

Not gross looking or feeling at all.

The consistency was a little looser than what I usually work with when I make meatballs, but it worked out.  I was a little concerned that sitting in the pan for an hour or two before I could cook them up would cause them to flatten, but it wasn't too bad.

Look at 'em!  There they are.

Now here's where things start to go wrong.  I usually bake meatballs on a rack over a sheet pan.  Seeing an oven temperature listed, I put the pan of meatballs right into the oven.  But after 20 minutes or so, I looked at the recipe again.  Clearly, I was supposed to brown them on the stove before making the gravy and putting it all into the oven.  Oops.

I'm glad I didn't follow the directions on the recipe though.  Boil meatballs?  Put them in the oven to boil for a long time after they've been browned??  Yeah, no thanks.  That gravy too!  If I stopped following the recipe once, I'm not going to try start now.  Besides, the meatballs were already done.  I don't know about you, but I want my gravy to have flavor.  There's not going to be a lick of flavor if the liquid used is just water.  Drowning meatballs in Elmer's glue would probably have better flavor than a gravy with a water base.

At this point in time, I pulled out the cooked meatballs, added a few tablespoons of flour and cooked the rawness out for a couple minutes.  Then I deglazed the pan with some white wine, then added some water (Why?  Why did I do this?  I must have felt some responsibility to Mrs. Gust still), and some chicken broth.  It wasn't as thick as I'd like, so I thickened it more with some corn starch (mixed into some water first, and whisked it in slowly).  Despite the wine and broth, it was still REALLY bland.

I love good gravy.  There are few foods that I enjoy quite as much as a big plate of mashed potatoes and some really good gravy.

Silly Boromir!

You got it, Natalie!

The only salvation for this gravy was umami, lots of umami.  It wasn't going to be great gravy, but at least it needed some flavor.  So I added a bunch of soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce.  The flavor wasn't quite right, but it wasn't quite wrong either, and at least there was some flavor.  It wasn't drinkin' gravy, but it would suffice.

Meatballs were done.  Gravy was done.  So I cooked up some mashed potatoes, and some glazed carrots to give me more than meat for dinner.  At this point in time it was just me having dinner, 'cause the whole process too too long to complete so Sarah and the boys wound up having leftovers.  Oh well.  Anyway, here's the result.

Looks kind of like something my grandmother would have recognized.

Tasting and Reaction

It was mainly me eating the meatballs and gravy, so I don't have any reaction save my own.  As far as the meatballs go, well, they kind of tasted like meat.  There wasn't much flavor to speak of.  That whole 1/4 teaspoon of allspice played about as much of a role in these meatballs as you might expect.  I was tasting something though, and I couldn't put my finger on it, but it was probably Worcestershire sauce in the gravy.  As you can see, the meatballs did flatten out a bit too, so they were almost more like meat disks than meatballs.

The gravy had a really nice consistency, and good color.  The flavor was alright, but we'll just say that I didn't feel too bad about tossing out the bit of extra gravy I had after I'd finished all of the meatballs and gravy a couple days later.

No, I didn't follow the recipe very well, but no, I don't feel too bad about it.  I'm really not very interested in boiling meat.  The meatballs had very little flavor, and the gravy that would have been made by this recipe would have had even less flavor.  I'm sorry Mrs. Gust Haugen, you didn't sell me on your Norwegian meatballs.  Maybe I'll stick to Swedish meatballs.  Maybe I'll also think twice about making another of your recipes.  That pea ring was horrendous, the cabbage rolls were supremely bland, and now this.  Oof-da!  That's not a good track record.

Next time:  Meats & Hot Dishes!