"My Way" Swedish Meatballs

I want to think I cook well. In fact, a lot of people have been prodding me and hubbie to put up our own catering business. We've toyed with the idea sometimes, imagining that we'd be able to do that instead of working in the "corporate" world. But, as much as we both love cooking and we're actually a great team together, given the current situations we separately have right now, we just can't leave our individual works to do so. Maybe when everything is just about me and hubbie, we might be able to do just that.

But for now, here's another of my quick-think recipes that, half-suprisingly, turned out good. I say just "half" because instinctively, I know you can never go wrong with some Campbell's Cream of Mushroom at hand

We had a Christmas lunch at work last week and I was supposed to bring spring rolls (lumpiang shanghai). Unfortunately, I postponed doing them "a little" (ok, make that "really") too late that I didn't realize we'd ran out of spring roll wrappers. And going to an Oriental store to get some was out of the question.

So I'd do what I usually did - made a quick inventory of what we have in the kitchen and try to wing it from there. I saw that we've got 2 cans of Campbell's Beef Gravy and a lot of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom (my culinary bestfriend). We also had a sachet of the meatballs sauce that you get from Ikea. So I figured, that only thing missing here is meatballs. So I drove to our local BJ's store and got a huge bag of pre-cooked swedish meatballs.

And that was it. When I got back home, I prepared the meatballs first by deep-frying them just for a minute or so and set them aside. Then I chopped some onions, sauteed them, put in a can of cream of mushroom, a can of evaporated milk, and the Ikea meatball sauce. Then I added the beef gravy. Let it simmer (don't let it boil), and had a taste.

I actually amazed myself - it tasted good.

But there wasn't enough sauce for all the meatballs I cooked so I repeated the procedure - added in another can of cream of mushroom, milk and beef gravy (I only had 1 pack of the Ikea sauce). I added some pepper just to give it some spice. Had another taste of it, and it was perfect!

Since the party wasn't going to be until the next day, hubbie told me not to mixed them in both until tomorrow. So on the way to work, the meatballs were in our slow cooker and the sauce was in a tupperware container. And when I got to work, I poured in the sauce and set my slow cooker to high for an hour and then switched it to warm.

Did my co-workers like it? Between the actual Christmas lunch and the "left-over lunch" we had the next day (when we continued to eat what we had left), I had to say, I came home empty-handed