Lightened-Up Swedish Meatballs

My cookbook collection was taking over the dining room.

What started as a few carefully selected books calling the top of the radiator home had become a mess of books stacked every which way and cluttering up the space. Even our marble bookends couldn’t keep the heavy stack upright, and when they came crashing down for the millionth time, we realized that we needed some real shelves in the space.

You totally see where this is going, right? Yup… we talked about going to Ikea and buying some shelves to turn into a fake built-in.

Which inevitably lead me to crave Swedish meatballs.

Anyway, we never made it to Ikea but a few weeks later the idea of Swedish meatballs was still nagging at me.

Traditional Swedish meatballs are very heavy though — full of pork and beef, fried in ungodly amounts of butter, and coated in cream — and well, stores are already selling bathing suits….

I found a recipe from Elise that looked easy enough to lighten up and I made a few substitutions:

• extra-lean turkey instead of red meat
• baking instead of frying (you could also make air fryer chicken meatballs!)
• way less butter.

Served over egg noodles and next to some sauteed chard, these Swedish meatballs made a delicious meal that definitely satisfied my craving. (If you’re wondering, the cookbooks have been relocated to a better shelf in the living room where they stay put without any bookends.)

Kitchen Tip: We don’t eat a lot of bread, so I don’t buy it very often. When we do buy it, it tends to get stale before we can eat it all. I’ve taken to throwing the past few end pieces into a bag in the freezer to use as fresh breadcrumbs, which yield softer meatballs than “regular” bread crumbs. Just pull out a frozen pice of bread or two, smash it with a mallet to make crumbs, and let it defrost for a few minutes.

Lightened-Up Swedish Meatballs