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There's a pleasant whiff of Elmer's glue and hand sanitizer in the air, because it's back to school week at BonAppetit.com. Every day we'll be celebrating the good, not-so-good, and artificially-colored snacks of childhood, school cafeterias, and beyond.
Mrs. Local, Seasonal, Processed-Foods-Will-Ruin-Us-All here is going to come out and say it: I buy Ikea food for my son.
If you have kids and/or live near a city, Ikea is just part of your life. Because the actual act of shopping there—especially with kids—is so epic (read: traumatic), you want to pack in as much shopping as you can. Which means you inevitably end up in the food section, usually via the meltdown-averting sticky bun. Once I started looking around, though, I found things that resonated with my snobby, Scandi-attuned palate. Reading the labels, and knowing that the company is sensitive about its food projects after that whole horse-meat-in-the-meatballs disaster, I decided that my four-year-old son could try them, too. Though he’s not adventurous enough for the caviar in a tube (that’s Knowlton Family territory), I now stock plenty of IKEA food for snacks. Here are his favorites:
Frozen potato fritters that fry up for a quick dinner, topped with labneh and berries for him, or crème fraîche and smoked salmon for me.
Thin, lavash-like bread from the freezer section that can be toasted and sliced into small squares for toddler canapés (that was a joke), or made into an almond-butter wrap.
With their lo-fi packaging and sesame-dill-poppy seed-sea salt topping, these thin crackers are the kind of things you’d snap up for some borderline-insulting price at your cheese store. Though they’re my son’s daycare snack, I have been known to put cheese alongside them for friends…
These sturdy but flaky, whole-grainy rye crackers are what I buy the most of. They rotate with rice cakes for almond-butter-and-jelly delivery vehicle of choice. And I love them with cheese or labneh.
In Scandinavia, these little “rusks” of cardamom-scented super-toast are served for breakfast, cardamom being the official baking spice of Scandinavia. Amen. Dipped into milk or juice, they are acceptable to American children, too. I also followed their serving suggestion of smashing one and adding the crumbs to yogurt. 👍
Ikea is about to ban soda in favor of “fruit water” in all of its stores—a very big deal considering that it is one of the biggest restaurants in the world when you add it all up. A couple of teaspoons of their sweet-tart syrups in seltzer equals the occasional soda for my son. He loves rhubarb, elderflower, and lingonberry—you know, those Noma-forward flavors. Ha. I would also like to point out that they make excellent cocktail mixers. And the elderflower juice box is too foodie twee to resist.
What is a cloudberry? This discussion fills time at the table, while my son eats it spread on any of the above crackers, or swirled into yogurt. I have 14 jars of really beautiful small-batch jam in my cabinet, but I let this one squeak through. Because: What is a cloudberry?
[Okay, I'll tell you: Cloudberries are tart, salmon-hued wild fruit, similar to raspberries or blackberries in that they are shaped by ‘drupelets.’ Yes, that’s a thing. One more Wikifun fact: A cloudberry appears on the Finnish 2-euro coin.]
Okay, buying Ikea cheese is where I start to get twitchy, but this semi-hard, kinda sweet cheese is really good on those rye crackers for a lunchbox snack.