Swedish meatballs, page 78
I diverged pretty heavily from the recipe here. I’m not totally sure what celeriac is, and Tesco didn’t have any when I did a shopping order, so I did without it. And because then the rice would have been pretty boring, I added saffron and paprika while cooking it.
The meatballs, on the other hand, and the sauce, were excellent exactly as Jamie described. Don’t change a thing.
What a very lovely dinner.
So, this is really Swedish meatballs with saffron and paprika rice, which is not in the book at all, but is delicious for all that. One big question is: how do you know that a meatball is cooked? I’m always a bit worried about that; being cooked on the outside is emphatically not the same thing as being cooked on the inside, and if the meatballs were entirely lean steak mince then I wouldn’t have been too worried, but they’re half lean steak mince and half pork, and even I know that undercooked pork is a trip to the hospital if the stars line up wrong. In the end I picked the biggest meatball and cut it in half with the wooden spoon I use to move things around in the frying pan.
Also: 10 meatballs, thank you very much. I don’t know who’d be happy with five plus a bowl of rice, but I’m sure they’re about 3'2" tall. Unless celeriac’s a lot more filling than every other vegetable ever.
Now to work out what to do with the rest of the cream. I wish I had, say, an apple strudel to put it on.