Meatloaf!

No no no. Not that wonderful dad who coached Little League and sang in Rocky Horror Picture Show and so forth.

The EATING kind.

See, over at Pretty Lady's the other day, commenter-blogger-artist Chris Rywalt mentioned making meatloaf for his wife the engineer.

I like meatloaf. Depending on the recipe, I even like it a LOT. But I always had trouble making it come out consistently. And I remember Chris mentioning before that he did a lot of cooking and was considering producing an actual cookbook.

So I asked Chris if he had a good meatloaf recipe. Voila! He did, indeed. And kindly, Pretty Lady posted it.

Oh BOY!

Then I had to sleep for a week or so and some time went by. I had some ground pork to mix in with the ground chuck, but it didn't make it.

Poor Livey had to fend for herself for dinner AND breakfast for a while. And when I get back out of bed I'm a little...slow. I wanted to cook again but I was taking baby steps.

Luckily, Trig's had chuck On Sale $1.99/pound, yay!

Livey brought home over 3 pounds. This was GREAT. See, our tastes in seasonings and procedures are a little different sometimes, like with everyone.

All that meat meant I could I make...TWO meat loaves! Do a little experimenting.

I finally picked my cooking day and I was ready, but when I started it was a little late in the day and we were already hungry. That's why there aren't many pix. Sorry everyone! I had to concentrate on getting that food in the oven.

Okay. I realized early on that all that careful mixing by hand was holding me back from cooking meat loaf more often. When you mix ground beef with other things, it's best not to compact it too much. I get tired standing up, can't do it for more than a couple minutes at a time.

But Chris says he uses a dough hook sometimes.

Hmmm...I don't have one here. But I can half-way imitate it by using the little hand mixer but with only one beater in it instead of two.

And it worked! Cool!!!

Then, since I don't have a blender or food processor here, I considered how to get the onion and carrot fine enough. Okay. Easy. I grated them on a cheese grater. The garlic I put through a garlic press, so that was fine enough. Bread crumbs I'm used to making by hand. Dry them out a bit on low heat, let them cool and wait till they're completely dry, then crumble with your fingers. I got that done the day before. The work time is very short, the drying time can be long.


So. Starting with all the ingredients we had in common, for each meatloaf I had:

Apx. 1.25 # ground chuck
Apx. 3/4 c bread crumbs
Around half of a large and very sweet Vidalia onion, grated
2 cloves garlic, pressed
1 t salt
1 egg

I further seasoned them as follows:
Livey's, by request: Apx. 2 t Italian seasoning and 1 t oregano

Mine: Apx. 1 T poultry seasoning (substituted for thyme)
I grated carrot

I gently and carefully mixed each one separately with the hand mixer and one beater. It worked great! It was well-mixed but not compacted.

Livey wanted hers to stay in the Pyrex loaf pan. Me, I wanted the inverted stand alone kind. Great chance to try it both ways.

I don't have a meat thermometer, and Livey's oven runs a bit cool, so I cooked them for about 50 minutes on 350 degrees (probably that meant 325 degrees).

Then I put the oven on 500 degrees for around 8 minutes to get the crusty crust.

At the very end, the juices in my pan got a little blackened. But that was only at the outside of the meat loaf, the actual loaf wasn't blackened at all.


So out they came.

And they were PERFECT! Oh my!

They were BOTH delicious. Wonderful flavor and texture, nice and juicy, nice brown outsides. Perfectly cooked in the middle, no pink.

And for the first time in a very long while, I couldn't even say which version of an experiment I liked better. I kept going between them, testing. Nope. One was simply not better than the other.

We demolished them pretty well, and still had just the right amounts left for meat loaf sandwiches.

YUM!!!

Thank you, Chris! That was great.