My Kitchen My World - Sweden

Cutting it close this month! But the last day of August still counts. :)

This month for My Kitchen My World we visited the cuisine of Sweden. I didn't want to do Swedish meatballs, they're too well-known around here to be considered a challenge. Instead, I found a dish called Kroppkakor, or potato dumplings. They turned out so delicious. I don't think I added nearly enough flour to the dough, which made it extremely messy to work with, but at least it tasted good!

Swedish Kroppkakor
10 medium potatoes, peeled, boiled, and cooled
1 egg
1 1/4 cup flour, or enough to make a soft dough
8 oz. bacon, diced
1 small onion, diced
1 tsp. ground allspice

Mash potatoes. Mix in egg and flour to make soft dough, set aside.

Fry bacon and onion until bacon is crispy and onion is soft. Add allspice. I just want to note that this mixture smells absolutely incredible!

Flatten pieces of dough into rounds. Top with 1-2 tsp. bacon mixture, then close the dough around the filling and form a ball.

Drop dumplings into simmering salted water, 4 or 5 at a time. Cook for about 5 minutes (another recipe said 15 minutes, we did somewhere in between).

Serve with bechamel sauce (basic white sauce) or melted butter, and lingonsylt (lingonberry jam). We didn't have lingonberry jam, so I had Jeff make some cranberry sauce instead.

With the potatoes, and the allspice, and the cranberry sauce, this stuff tasted like Thanksgiving! It totally put me in a fall mood. Jeff and I each had several dumplings, my 3-yr-old and 1-yr-old each devoured two, and my two older kids were only able to tolerate one after I put ketchup on it.

One recipe I found says that leftover dumplings are good cut up and fried crispy the next morning. I know what we're having for breakfast tomorrow! :)


*Update: We chopped up the leftovers and fried them in bacon grease. They turned out quite yummy.