Meatloaf

One day I just woke up and had a desire to eat meatloaf and mashed potatoes.  YUM! Comfort food.  Had they not closed the McDonald’s Dinner I would of just went through their drive through and gotten it to go.  So instead it’s a stop at the grocery store – boo! And them some wonderful time in my kitchen – YEAH!

How I did meatloaf, this time.  Well I bought several chunks of meat a package of ground chuck, a package of ground turkey, a package of ground bison (cause it was on sale I got 2) and a chunk of pork as we can’t get ground pork here.  So this is too many kinds and I need to pick.  Once I get home I determine that holding the bison for later is a great idea.  I grind 1/2 of the pork chunk and proceed to take half of the other 2 kinds of meet.  So I am sitting at 1/3 mixture of each. 

So I tend to like things healthy.  This may be an issue for KLT because this paticular meat loaf turned out a little dry or lean as I called it.  I need to make sure this is full of flavor to make up for the lack of fat.  🙂  We start by cooking a fine dice of onion and celery until translucent.  No one wants crispy chunks in their meat loaf.

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For this amount of meat ~2 lbs I used one rib of celery and 1/2 an onion. While this is cooking you can get the other items in a bowl. Start with grating one lg carrot and a couple cloves of garlic. At this point you could use jar garlic or run it through a press but WHY dirty something else. I like to add grate about 1/4 of an onion – you mostly get juice out of this.

Here we have our 3 types of ground meat and the grated veggies.
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Add to this one beaten egg, 1/2 a cup of bread crumbs (trying to keep the needless carb count down) and seasonings. Here is were you can change everything and make this go 100 different directions. For this particular meatloaf I added 1 packet of store bought seasoning, couple dashes of regular steak seasoning and substituted a hand full of seasoned crouton pulsed in the food processor for some of the bread crumbs. Wanna go more Italian add dry spaghetti mix (or your own herbs) and top with red sauce. Wanna go Mexican? Add taco seasoning and salsa. Feel like you need cheese press your meatloaf out put a layer of cheese in there and roll it up. Need more ideas? WRAP IT IN BACON!

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These are my meatloaves ready for their next stop, the big one gets put in the freezer and then vacuum sealed and the little one gets put in the oven @ 350 for about 45 minutes. I don’t like my meat DONE so you should use your own judgement.

I totally failed to take pictures after it was done, but I will tell you I served it with mashed potatoes and jar beef gravy. 🙂

KLT cooked his meatloaf a week or so after mine and he really enjoyed it even though it was lean. He said he didn’t even notice. Now either my trying to make him healthier is working or he really just enjoyed the not having to really cook for a home cooked meal.

🙂

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