Lunch Archives - Page 14 of 18

Swedish (ish) Meatballs with Cream Gravy

June 13, 2024March 27, 2017 by Emily

Real, hømemåde Swedish meatballs in a rich, cream gravy is as comforting as dinner gets. Serve it with boiled potatoes, lingonberry preserves and cucumber salad.

Have you ever dragged your a$$ all the way to Ikea supposedly because you desperately need a new Lillnaggen for your bathroom (but really it’s because you can’t live another day without a Swedish meatball). Do you crave meatballs the way a theater kid craves a spotlight? Do you power-walk straight past all those cozy-looking beds and then say, “Oh look, the cafe. Totes forgot they had one. Hmmm, it does happen to be meatballtime, er I mean lunchtime.”

(Five orders of meatballs later…) “What?”

Yeah, I’d have no idea about that (wipes nutmeg-scented gravy off lips with a Guldlök napkin).

Vietnamese-Style Baked Chicken

June 13, 2024March 20, 2017 by Emily

Vietnamese-style baked chicken; Chicken thighs (or breasts) marinated in a mixture of fish sauce, sugar, herbs and lime juice and then oven-baked to create a dish infused with flavor and browned to perfection.

Baked marinated chicken is one of our favorite weeknight dinners. What’s that – just mix up some spices, soak chicken thighs in it for a half hour, and then stick it in the oven? Sign me up. The more interesting the flavors, the more it’s a miracle that such a straightforward process can result in a delicious dinner. And so it is with this Vietnamese-style baked chicken.

There’s a lot going on in the marinade, but one of the standouts – possibly even the key ingredient – is the anchovy-based Vietnamese fish sauce, or nuoc mam. If you’ve never encountered it, you’ve got a treat ahead of you. This sauce is used as a dressing or dip (for example, as an accompaniment to spring rolls) but we actually use it all the time, even in non-Asian recipes, where we want to add a little salt and that distinctive fishy, savory note. Along with rice vinegar and sesame oil, it’s a great condiment to have as part of a simple Asian pantry.

Vietnamese spices — Lime, ginger, palm sugar, chile sauce, cilantro and fish sauce.

Note: This recipe is part of our on-going series with Serious Eats. You can also find this recipe, and other great ones, on their site.

French Onion Strata – a savory bread pudding

June 13, 2024March 6, 2017 by Emily

The flavors of French onion soup transported into a hearty, cheesy strata. The heart of bread pudding paired with the soul of a classic soup – synergy on a plate.

We’re big fans of bread pudding of almost every stripe. With one basic method and either a savory or a sweet set of ingredients, you can throw together a wide variety of dishes with bread, eggs, and milk: the framework. We generally reserve the term “bread pudding” for a sweet variation, and “strata” for the savory version where there’s usually more eggs involved. It works so well, for the last few years we’ve exclusively used a strata as a Thanksgiving-day stuffing. We liked the technique so much, we wanted to find out what else we could do with it.

French Onion Strata - a savory bread pudding — Cheesy, gooey deliciousness.

Note: This recipe is part of our ongoing series with Serious Eats. You can also find this recipe, and many other great ones on their site.

Gamush: Easy Weeknight Pasta Bolognese

June 13, 2024February 27, 2017 by Matt

It’s been a while since we blogged about a recipe with family history. We’ve been doing quite a bit of commissioned work for Serious Eats, and they’re a professional outfit you know, and you can’t just submit any old tosh on their site (ahem). Their readers are a refined, questing bunch, wanting to get to the nitty gritty of a recipe without having to weed-whack through paragraphs of us arse-ing around talking about our chickens, or what kind of expression our dog is making (bored, if you must know), or that time we tried to juggle seven lemons. As you know, we leave all the old tosh for our own site, so it is with a familiar thud that I dust off the book of Nerds Family History and tell you all about gamush.

Baked Brie – A Primer

June 13, 2024February 20, 2017 by Matt

A Baked Brie can turn the standard cheese board into a highlight of a gathering: a warm, gooey communal comfort food.

A party without cheese is like Valentine’s Day without chocolate, and, while a well-curated cheese plate will likely do the job for any occasion, a wheel of baked Brie will deliver maximum impact with a minimum of effort. Especially at a winter party, it can turn the standard cheese board into a highlight of a gathering: a warm, gooey communal comfort food.

Making a baked Brie (or a baked Camembert, Brie’s soft-rind cousin) can be as simple as tossing the cheese in the oven with some kind of drizzled topping, or you can go all out by serving it en croûte—wrapping it up in puff pastry with any number of store-bought or homemade sweet condiments.

Note: This Baked Brie series is also available on Serious Eats!

Crispy Pan-Seared Salmon with Creamy Lemon Rice

June 13, 2024January 9, 2017 by Emily

Flaky, moist salmon with perfectly crisp skin, sitting on a bed of creamy lemon rice. It might look fancy but it’s a cinch to make, even on a weeknight.

Hey, you! Our old buddy! You made it out of 2016! Us too – and look, Nerds with Knives is exactly where you left it, a little battered, a little bruised perhaps, but we made it to the other side of the timeline mostly intact. Now, don’t get alarmed, but we’ve moved a few things around. We’re on new hosting, which won’t affect your NWK experience too much (perhaps a little faster, do you think?), we have a new ad partner, and we are now Pinteresting like never before. You can visit and follow us here. Other than that, it’s still just the two of us wombling along making things to eat and hoping you like them.

I know that the food trends in the beginning of January are all about salads and smoothies (and salad smoothies and smoothie salad bowls, etc), but we decided to go in a different direction. It’s 19 degrees and snowing tonight and while I like a good smoothie as much as the next food blogger, I want something warm and comforting as well as healthy for dinner.