Recipe of the Month: Vegan Swedish Meatballs

Some months, I have to scramble to come up with a Recipe of the Month before I run out of days to post it in. I often have to make do with something that isn't really a brand-new recipe, but a variation on something we've made many times before, such as our favorite pasta a la Caprese. So it came as a pleasant surprise when this month, I actually found myself with numerous new recipes to choose from. 

Some of these were simply variants on older dishes. For instance, one night Brian tried tinkering with his usual recipe for corn bread, throwing in some almond flour and a little leftover tofu to make it less carb-heavy.

 Another evening, he altered a pasta recipe we'd made many times before, Cavatelli with Arugula and Dried Cranberries, by replacing the pasta with quinoa. (This worked surprisingly well.)

He also tried a new variant on the no-knead bread recipe he uses for our favorite Roasted Eggplant and Pepper Sandwiches. He'd already made this quite successfully with whole wheat flour in place of white, so he decided to take it a step farther and add all the extra ingredients he uses in my breakfast bread to make it healthier, including rolled oats, wheat bran, and flax meal. This made for a very heavy, chewy loaf that, unfortunately, didn't bake quite all the way through in the middle. But he thinks that was because he made the loaf too big, so it had too high a volume compared to its surface area. He plans to try it again using either a smaller batch of dough or a larger pot to cook it in.

A couple of other recipes we tried were brand-new, but fairly simple. For instance, a "Blue Hawaiian Shake" we discovered in the "mocktails" section of a mixology book had only four ingredients: blueberries, coconut cream, milk (we used soy), and ice. The result was more of a smoothie than a mocktail, but quite satisfying.

And then there were the little date balls Brian whipped up as a healthy snack for me — kind of like a homemade energy bar. These were a little less successful. The mixture of chopped dates, chopped walnuts, oats, and a little cocoa powder was reasonably tasty, but it didn't hold together very well.

But the most elaborate new recipe we tried this month was the Vegan Swedish Meatballs from It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken. This recipe caught my attention when it was first published at the end of August, so I printed it out and put it on the pile of ideas for future use. And this month, Brian fished it out of the pile and tried it.

This recipe was fairly involved. The author of the blog says she used canned lentils to make it, but we've never seen such a thing, so Brian had to cook the lentils before he could do anything else. And as it turns out, even in the pressure cooker, dry brown lentils take about 20 minutes to cook. Moreover, even though he used about three cups of water to one cup of lentils, it turned out to be not nearly enough, and the volume of cooked lentils he ended up with was much smaller than he expected. But having invested so much time already, he didn't want to backtrack and try making something else for dinner, so he forged ahead with what he had, combining the cooked lentils with wheat gluten and seasonings and pulsing it all in the food processor to form a "crumbly dough" — perhaps a bit more crumbly than intended.

After that, he had to form the dough into balls and steam them. This part of the process was also time-consuming: he had to bring the water to a boil first, then load the meatballs into a steamer basket and cook them for 25 to 30 minutes. (It might be possible to cut the time by starting to heat the water before preparing the dough.) And once that was done, he had to fry them in a pan with oil.

While the balls were steaming, he was working on the side dishes. IKEA always serves its meatballs with mashed potatoes, lingonberries, and a creamy gravy, but Brian decided to substitute oven-roasted potatoes (with skin) as a slightly healthier alternative to mashed. The meatball recipe included a creamy gravy, but it called for "vegan "beefless" broth or mushroom broth," which he didn't have. So he whipped up his own by simmering together about 1/4 pound of chopped mushrooms, a clove of crushed garlic, a teaspoon of nutritional yeast, and half a teaspoon of salt for about 20 minutes. Then he mixed this with the vegan butter and flour called for in the recipe, substituting coconut cream (which we had left over from the blueberry shake) for the "vegan culinary cream." And finally, he cooked up some green beans as a vegetable side.

Considering all the difficulties Brian had with these meatballs, they turned out surprisingly well, with an umami-rich flavor and a satisfyingly chewy texture. In fact, they were remarkably similar to the "plant balls" from IKEA — which is somewhat surprising, since they have almost no ingredients in common. (Their HUVUDROLL plant balls are made with "pea protein, oats, potatoes, onion and apple," so pretty much the only ingredient they share is onion.) They paired quite well with the lingonberries, potatoes, and beans. I found the gravy a little less successful, since the coconut cream gave it a distinct coconut note that didn't seem to me to fit in with the rest of the flavors in the dish. But it kind of grew on me after a while and I not only finished up my portion but even went back for one extra meatball, gravy included. And the hearty dish was satisfying to the tummy as well as the palate; I didn't find myself wandering back to the fridge for a snack later in the evening, the way I usually do a few hours after dinner.

Although we both enjoyed these vegan Swedish meatballs, I wasn't sure if it was worth making them again, considering the effort involved. However, Brian thinks they will go more easily next time. Being familiar with the recipe, he'll have a better idea of how long everything takes, and he'll be able to avoid problems like the too-small volume of lentils. So he plans to try it at least once more. It may be too elaborate a recipe to become part of our everyday rotation, but it will be nice to have in the repertoire for those slow, lazy weekends.