Given that the whole place smells likecinnamon rollsandSwedish meatballs, it is not difficult to develop an appetite while you're walking through IKEA, even if you're just there to pick up anotherPOÄNGfor the living room. The enticing smells, and the placement of the grocery section just past the checkout line, are a bit of a sly trick, really: you've spent hours finding your way through the place, you're hungry and tired, you're laden with unassembled furniture, you've broken up and gotten back together with your significant other three times already today, you finally pay, you think about how to pick up the pieces of your wrecked life, and then there it is: the grocery section. How convenient! Now you can complete your IKEA lifestyle by buying the makings of dinner.
Can youreally? The other day I trekked down to my local Swedish multinational furniture retailer for the sole purpose of grocery shopping, with dinner in mind. (I was even able to escape without a new chair or house plant.) Here's what I found:
There are pastries and crackers and coffee, of course. Plenty of sweet treats, especially if you likemarzipan. But in terms of dinnertime, there aren't a ton of options, and what's there is mostly frozen. For your protein, you've gotsalmon,shrimp, those ubiquitousmeatballs, someveggie balls. I picked up some frozen salmon fillets and went looking for something to flavor them with. (I note here that the Swedish side of my family traditionally eats meatballs every Christmas Eve, and this past Christmas my grandma took a break from making them and instead we got, yep, IKEA meatballs with IKEAcream sauce. I can vouch for their quality.)
IKEA's not exactly a place for fresh produce, either—for the veggie course I ended up withfrozen vegetable cakes, little pucks of potato, broccoli, and cheese that you rewarm in the oven. What the IKEA grocery section is particularly good on is starch, in all its manifest forms, and that's what my IKEA dinner ended up featuring quite heavily: gotta get through those long winters somehow, I guess. I ended up withpotatoes, agrain mix,and some bread— though by dinnertime the bread seemed like overkill, and I set it aside.
For dinner that night, then, I threw some of those potato-enhanced vegetable cakes and somefrozen potato rostiin the oven. I also prepared the whole-grain mix—oat, wheat, rye, and barley, flavored with porcini mushroom, parsley, onion, and thyme—that came together near instantly: boil in water for one minute, cover for 10. I dredged the salmon fillets through an IKEAapple-and-fennel spice mix, and broiled them.
So there you have it: apple and fennel salmon fillets were the main attraction, accompanied by potato rosti (with a sweet dill-mustard sauce available by the jar, and fried-onion garnish that also comes prepackaged) and a few creamy and quite delicious vegetable cakes. The salmon was moist and well-flavored, the rosti were salty and satisfying.
Worth a trip? Well, the only IKEA outlets I've been to have tended to be a bit challenging to get to—you leave Chicago and drive all the way out to Schaumburg, you take a series of complicated train and bus rides across Brooklyn to get to the very end of Red Hook. I'm not sure it's worth all that just to get some frozen food. But the food is good, Swedish cuisine isn't something you stumble across every day, and you're going to be in an IKEA at least twice a year for the rest of your life, so...why not?
