Meatloaf I (p. 512), Meat Loaf Sandwich (p. 183), Thousand Island Dressing (p. 576), and Cabbage, Potatoes, and Ham (p. 263)

Meatloaf is something that I never really liked growing up. But the recipe looked fairly easy and I figured it was time to make something I wasn't really looking forward to. Unfortunately, there is actually a fairly significant list of recipes I'm not looking forward to and I have to sprinkle them throughout otherwise I'm afraid that I'm going to have a year of eating gross foods (granted, they might be better than I expect--terrines were on that list and the terrine on Top Chef looked pretty tasty, so I could be wrong). Mom always made meat loaf when I was growing up and I never really liked it--likely because she always jammed it full of onions and I don't really care for onions unless all the flavor is cooked out of them.

I made Meatloaf I (p. 512). It's a simple meatloaf recipe.

First step--mix beef (it specifies both chuck and round but I just used the generic ground beef from CostCo), onions, bread crumbs, catsup, parsley, eggs, tyme, salt, and pepper.



Mix it with your hands! It's so gushy--this part always reminds me of being a little kid and playing with play-doh (I LOVED play-doh!). The parsley isn't very well cut up--I really want one of those herb strippers from Williams-Sonoma because I get pretty bored with chopping parsley pretty quickly.

Stuff the meat mixture into a loaf pan. The recipe says to "mound" the mixture. I'm not sure how you are supposed to do that so I didn't really worry about it. Amusingly, after I raved about this recipe to my mom and she made it, she mentioned the same problem.

See...my lack of sniping the parsley means I have tiny bushes in the landscape of my meatloaf...



Bake it for until it's 160 degrees--and use your meat thermometer! It is supposed to "pull" away from sides, which it did.




How was it? REALLY good. I mean REALLY good. As someone who doesn't usually like meatloaf, this was DAMN good. I don't know why--there is nothing at all special or odd in the recipe. It must be the proportions. But it was just amazing. Mom said hers was great too when she made it so I have to put this on the "you should make immediately" list.

To optimize the meatloaf, I decide to make a Meat Loaf Sandwich (p. 183) for Josh. The bad part of this was that the second ingredient is either green goddess or thousand island dressing, neither of which I had. I decided to make Thousand Island Dressing (p. 576) so I could finish the sandwich recipe.


This recipe was really easy. Mix mayo, chili sauce or catsup (I used half of each), one hard-boiled egg, pickle relish, onion, chives (I used freeze dried), parsley, salt, and pepper.




The dressing was really tasty--much better than any thousand island dressing I've ever had out of a bottle. So far, the dressings in TJOC are perfection!

Back to the sandwich...

Bread, lettuce (I think I used spinach), onion, some meatloaf, and the dressing (which isn't included in this picture).



Josh said it was extremely tasty and went back for seconds, so if you make meatloaf, seriously considering making a meatloaf sandwich with your leftovers.

Cabbage is wonderfully cheap in the fall/winter so I decided to make Cabbage, Potatoes, and Ham (p. 263). The first step is to simmer some smoked ham hocks in some water




A cabbage is then added (trimmed, cored, and quartered...I still don't know how to core a cabbage so I just cut out the middle) and some potatoes (the recipe says quartered but I cut it into slightly smaller chunks).





The vegetables are then simmered for a while and drained, leading to...




So how was it? Really good! Not as good as the green bean, ham, potato mixture that I made a couple months ago...but still really good. And cheap! Good for the bad economic times :)

This is going to be another example of posting several blogs at once, so make sure to read them all! I'm also going to try to update the index, too.