Now that I’m eating red meat again and have rediscovered the deliciousness that is a hamburger, I’m bringing home ground beef. It is one of the cheapest meats I can buy around here and I cut it with ground pork, which is so cheap they are practically giving it away. One of the things I’ve wanted to try to make is meatloaf. It was simply not something we had growing up, so I’d never made it.
On my break this afternoon, I Googled meatloaf recipes to see what’s in them. It turned out that the common ingredients were ground meat, seasoning, bread crumbs, egg, and ketchup as a topping/sauce, and that the baking time for about a pound of meat was 45 minutes to an hour.
Seasoning is to taste, bread crumbs are a filler, egg is a binder, and ketchup is sweet and slightly tangy sauce. Okay, I could work with that and what I had in my pantry.
Come dinner prep time, I dumped the following into a big bowl:
-about a pound total of ground pork and ground beef
-an amount that looked right of garlic powder and onion soup mix
-a small handful of quick cooking oats for my filler
-ground chia seeds for my binder
-a little water to make up for the lack of moisture from an egg
-BBQ sauce for the topping
I mixed everything but the BBQ sauce well, adding a little more water until the consistency looked ‘right’.
I then put it into my silicon loaf pan, smoothed out the top, and set a time for 4o minutes since my oven runs hot.
At the 30ish minute mark, I did a quick check and the juices were still pink. At the 40ish minute mark, the juices were brown, so I checked the internal temperature and the loaf was just about done. I spread BBQ sauce over the top and returned the loaf to the oven for another 10 minutes.
End result? A perfectly seasoned, perfectly loaf shaped (and not crumbly — it holds its shape!), meatloaf good enough for company.
There is something about cooking that makes me feel like a magician. I very, very rarely have complete fails and utter successes like these are most often the norm.
But you can see why I rarely share ‘recipes’ — I don’t use them. I’ve been cooking for so long that I can eyeball measurements. I know how certain foods look at a point in their cooking time, so I very rarely overcook or burn anything and I can get the meat and the perfectly cooked veggies to the table at the same time.
I’m completely self-taught from watching my parents in the kitchen and just doing a heck of a lot of it professionally when I worked in a group home as a teenager. I think that for this winter, it might be fun to find a cooking class in Maz!
I often use BBQ sauce instead of ketchup on top or 1/2 and 1/2. Meatloaf and mashed potatoes are one of my favorite meals 🙂
I very rarely have ketchup on hand. I only like it on French fries, so it’s a restaurant food for me. 🙂
My favourite carb is rice, so I had my meatloaf tonight with rice. 🙂
We never use recipes either. We get “ideas” for a meal and then just go with what we have in the house. We once took a salmon casserole to friend’s house for a potluck meal. They loved it and asked for the recipe. We told them what was in it but she wanted specific measurements which we could not supply. Months later she mentioned it again and added that when we decide to stop keeping the recipe a secret she would still like it. Sometimes you just can’t win!
I just don’t get the need to follow a recipe slavishly unless you’re baking, where the chemistry is really important. I cook enough to have an idea of how much of whatever ingredient on my list I’ll need to have the right flavour. I also have no problem subbing ingredients. If you told me what your ingredients were, I could very likely recreate you casserole if I wanted to. Cooking is just something that comes very naturally and easily to me. I guess I’m lucky!
You are lucky.
Cold meatloaf makes wonderful sandwich’s
Ooh, I don’t know. I’m not big on cold beef. What do you put on your sandwiches?
Mayo on a meatloaf sandwich, or ketchup if you are my brothers.
Nay on the mayo, don’t want to get ill. 🙂 I guess BBQ sauce for my current one since it doesn’t have ketchup.
We use finely chopped water chestnuts for filler. Then we shape the meat into patties and cook them on the griddle. Makes pre-portioned servings. Plus you could freeze the patties then cook them as you want to eat them so no leftover cold beef. I think. Not sure how chia seeds freeze.
For hamburgers, I mixed up all the meat, make patties, and then freeze them individually without cooking them. It would probably be less clean up to cook a big batch, but I prefer the freshly cooked taste over the reheated.
No problem freezing the chia seeds! I made my burgers with them so that the patties don’t fall apart. I’ve also frozen banana bread and other recipes made with the seeds. And I store my seeds in the freezer.