It’s been nearly six weeks of lockdown, and our cravings for normal social behavior are getting more desperate and less specific. Perhaps in your yearning for normalcy you’ve fantasized about a good ol’ trip to IKEA. No judgment there. Luckily for you, the Swedish furniture emporium posted a recipe for its beloved in-store meatballs and cream sauce, in the form of IKEA assembly instructions.
The instructions include IKEA’s iconic amorphous, smiling blob people. But instead of screwing bed frames together, said blobfolk are enjoying meatballs and cream sauce together. I, for one, am delighted.
Beyond the subject matter, there’s one major difference between normal IKEA furniture assembly guides and this recipe: the latter is actually decipherable. For one, the pictures for each step of the cooking process are accompanied by actual, written instructions. In case you’re blessed enough to have never assembled IKEA goods, their instruction manuals are typically wordless, involving an enigmatic trail of drawings featuring wooden planks in various positions. Constructing an IKEA coffee table at home typically feels like decoding an ancient amulet that spits out vaguely life-threatening premonitions. It’s confusing, time-consuming, and likely to leave you wondering how you even got into this situation in the first place. So the fact that these meatball instructions contain the words “Shape mixture into small, round balls” is a huge step toward clarity for IKEA.
Want the whole IKEA experience without making the warehouse a metaphor for your relationship and having a meltdown? Then for you, my friend, it’s meatball o’clock.