On a particularly bleak evening in late February, days after a historic blizzard had blanketed New York City in 16 inches of snow, I found myself in a familiar yet nonetheless agonizing conundrum: I needed to eat, and I had no food.Procuring food isn’t exactly easy for me. I live in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, where the closest supermarket is a 15-minute walk away. But you know what is close to me? IKEA. And IKEA happens to have a food market replete with frozen foods, all kinds of sauces and spreads, and gummies.After layering up and popping a lozenge — because, yes, I was also battling an unforgiving virus — I faced the cold white night to visit the Swedish Food Market. There, I indiscriminately grabbed anything that piqued my interest: sweet salad shrimp, cured salmon, and a pastel-pink princess cake.While many people treat IKEA as an out-of-the-way destination for affordable (if assembly-heavy) furniture, the store has come to mean something altogether new to me: a convenient place to grab groceries in a pinch. Since I ventured there on that miserable February evening, I’ve returned more times than I can count, and I seem to discover something different with each visit. Lisa Fischer, Brad Wickham, and Haley Anderson/NYT WirecutterTo determine which IKEA foods are worth the trip (because you can’t buy them online), my kitchen-team colleagues and I tasted our way through a wide assortment of the store’s edible offerings — from iconic staples like its Swedish meatballs to lesser-known items like pickled herring. Along the way, we identified 18 surprisingly delicious things that we’d go out of our way for.