Swedish (ish) Meatballs with Cream Gravy

Swedish Meatballs

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).

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Vanilla and Turmeric Pannacotta with Hibiscus Syrup

Vanilla and Turmeric Pannacotta with Hibiscus Syrup

Vanilla and turmeric-flavored pannacotta with hibiscus syrup. A) A rich, creamy, colorful dessert, or B) a murder victim on a teaplate? You be the judge! (Hint: It’s A.)

Every now and again with this blog, we create a recipe so unrepentantly weird that it seems a shame not to share it with the world. This week, we’d like to introduce to you a dish based on a gorse* pannacotta that we encountered a few years ago at one of our favorite restaurants, Llys Meddig in Newport, Wales.

Our vacation snapshot of the original dessert is too low-quality to share with you – suffice it to say that it was a delight and well worth trying to recreate. Pannacotta is pretty much a three-ingredient recipe (cream, sugar, gelatin) in its simplest form; all we would need, apparently, is some gorse.

So if you ever need to make a dessert suitable for a Murder Mystery night, we’ve got you covered.

*explanation of what the heck gorse is below

Vanilla and Turmeric Pannacotta
The turmeric gives these pannacotta a beautiful golden color and a delicate spice.

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Baked Brie en Croûte With Apple and Pear Compote

Baked Brie en Croûte with Spiced Apple and Pear Compote

Offering maximum impact with minimal effort, a baked Brie turns a mild-mannered cheese into the superhero of a gathering: a warm, gooey communal comfort food. This version wraps the cheese in a shell of flaky puff pastry, along with two sweet-tart layers of apple-pear compote.

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Baked Brie – A Primer

Baked Brie en Croute with Fig Jam
Baked Brie en Croute with Fig Jam

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!

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Crispy AF, Oven-Fried Sriracha-Honey Wings

Crispy AF, Oven-Fried Sriracha-Honey Chicken Wings

Seriously crispy and coated with a sweet and spicy Sriracha-honey glaze, these oven-baked wings rival fried ones any day. This is game day food done right. 

I’m pretty sure you haven’t come to a site called “Nerds with Knives” expecting sports talk because we are not sporty people. Any yelling and screaming you might hear from our house on a late Sunday afternoon is more likely to be about the crossword puzzle than the N.F.L.  – and, just an aside to Will Shortz at the New York Times, there had better not be too many sports related questions or these two bespectacled nerds will not be happy.

But just because we don’t know a touchdown from a layup doesn’t mean we don’t know game day snacks. That, we have covered.

We got your spicy meatballs, your savory meatballs, your mini shrimp cakes, your spiced and candied peanuts.  And now… these wings.

Truly crispy wings with a sticky, sweet and spicy glaze. And the best part? They’re baked, not fried.

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Garlic and Herb Roasted Pork Loin with Crackling (and Apple Chutney)

Garlic and Herb Roasted Pork Loin with Crackling

A hearty family roast, done right, is a cause for celebration – and a great reason to know your local butcher! This roasted pork loin is flavored with herbs and served with spiced apple chutney. And look at that crackling! 

As a Brit living in the US, there are times when I’m asked to explain a particularly confusing aspect of my native culture. One of these is the age-old conundrum of what, exactly, is the difference between lunch, dinner, tea, and supper, and how and when the terms can be used interchangeably. The full answer requires a lot of hand-waving about geography, generational differences, and social class, but inevitably will touch at some point upon the concept of a Sunday lunch which is often a large family gathering involving a roast of some kind, at which the most important element, by far, is crackling.

Note: This recipe is part of our series with Serious Eats. You can also find this, and other fantastic recipes on their site!

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