Globecooking recipe : Baked Cranberry Meatballs (Sweden)

I love globecooking recipes that are interesting twists on family favourites so I was keen to try out this recipe for Swedish Cranberry Meatballs that I spotted while browsing on the BBC Good Food website. The flavours complement each other perfectly with the dried cranberries adding a sweet and tart topnote, and the oven-baking method ended up being a healthy twist as it drew out a lot of the fat. Not pretty but definitely healthier !

Baked Cranberry Meatballs

ingredients :

a drizzle of oil

1 onion

1/2tsp mace or mixed spice

1 pack beef mince (about 500-650g)

100g dried cranberries

1 egg

Gently cook the onion in a drizzle of oil until soft. Add the spices and cook for a further minute, stirring to combine. Leave to cool.

Chop the cranberries in half.

Put the mince, cooled onion and cranberries in a bowl, season with salt and pepper and stir to combine. Crack in the egg to bind it all together and mix again.

Get your hands in and squish them into golfball sized meatballs.

Drizzle some oil into a roasting tin and put the meatballs in it. Bake for 20 minutes at 180° until cooked through.

My initial reaction when I pulled them out of the oven was yuck because all the fat and grease had leaked out and solidified.

This ended up being a Godsend though because I used a spoon to scrape off the congealed fat and marvelled at just how much fat we'd avoided eating. This wasn't cheap mince either so I was really surprised to see how much came out.

The meatballs were slightly dry because they'd lost all their fat so make sure you add a sauce (you could use extra cranberry sauce) or serve with something moist. I went for leftover pasta bake and ratatouille. You could even adapt these to use up chopped leftover turkey after Christmas.

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