Progressive Dinner Party: Entrees

Welcome to my little home on the interwebbies. Today we are having the Entrees portion of the Progressive Dinner Party put together by Amy, Nicole and Julie. Thank you!

I hope you enjoyed Nicole's Cornbread Stuffing and Chicken & Dumplings

I am serving a dish from the Swedish Christmas Dinner table: Meatballs. In Sweden we celebrate Christmas on the 24th with a big dinner of the smorgasbord variety (although my first years and I dispute this description, it is simply Christmas dinner). What is served varies from family to family but in a very unscientific pole with aforementioned first years the meatballs were voted the favourite dish.


Recipe
Ingredients

• 500 g minced beef (or mixture of minced beef and minced pork) (about 1lb)
• 1 dl fine breadcrumbs (0.4 US cups)
• 1 ½ dl milk (0.6 US cups)
• 1 ½ tsp salt
• 1 ½ pinch black pepper
• (1 ½ pinch allspice (we don’t use this in my family but some people do))
• 1 egg (we don’t use this in my family because of allergies but it does bind the meat together better)
• 1 small yellow onion finely chopped and sautéed

Directions
Mix breadcrumbs and milk together in a mixing bowl. Let them stand for at least 10 minutes to let the breadcrumbs swell.

Add salt and the minced beef to the bowl.

Add pepper, eggs and onions to the bowl and mix well but not to long.

Take out a cutting board and rinse it with water.

Roll the mixture into balls (slightly smaller than a golf ball).

Put butter in a frying pan and let it melt. Put in a bunch of meatballs (leaving enough space that they can be rolled around). To make sure that they are fried evenly you can shake them around (great job for kids if you have them, my brother loved doing this when he was growing up).

Put the cooked meatballs in a bowl or on a plate and then fry the next batch.

Some people don’t like the frying smell and my favourite food blogger Anne (who happens to be Swedish but bloggs in English) has a great recipe for making them in the oven.


Rårörda lingon  (Homemade lingonberry jam)
Ingredients:
1kg fresh lingon berries
7dl sugar

How to:
Put the berries in a bowl.

Slowly add the sugar while stirring using a wooden spoon.

Pour the finished jam into well cleaned cold jars. Keep in a cool dark place or freeze (if you freeze I would use plastic containers).

During the rest of the year we eat our meatballs with lingonberry jam cream sauce and boiled potatoes but not at Christmas when they are eaten with the rest of the Christmas food. If you can’t find fresh lingonberries you can use cranberries or IKEA sells lingonberry jam.

Head on over to Jo Lynne Valerie at Living and Writing with Passion for a taste of her Vino Marinara Sauce for pasta *and* a crustless 3-Cheese Spinach Quiche