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| Meatloaf: homegrown hormone-free beef |
Meatloaf is a super-easy, incredibly customizable main course. I don't remember ever making two meatloaves using the exact same ingredients. Sure, they all start out as a basic mixture of ground beef, egg, ketchup and breadcrumbs, but then it becomes an “anything goes” concoction controlled by the cook's whims. Tonight I started with a pound of homegrown, hormone-free ground beef, an egg, some Italian breadcrumbs, a squirt of ketchup, one sweet Spanish onion diced and sauteed with chopped garlic and a special ingredient that I've never put in a meatloaf before today – two very generous dollops of red pesto sauce. I discovered red pesto a few years ago. It's basically green pesto with sun dried tomatoes added for flavor and color, and it's tasty!
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| Homemade meatloaf dinner |
To accompany this masterpiece of ground meat there's only one sensible option - mashed potatoes! And for me there's only one way to do mashed potatoes correctly and that's garlic dirty mashed. Most of a potato's flavor lives in its skin, so leaving the skins on is a no-brainer. And garlic! Who doesn't like garlic? Four or five whole cloves of Baker's Acres of Plymouth garlic boiled and mashed with the final product adds a smooth sweetness. The trick to my mashed potatoes is the final mashing process. As soon a the water's drained I add real salted butter, at least 1/2 a stick cut into chunks and let that begin to melt. Then a quick mash to break things down a bit before adding one raw egg. Yes, a raw egg. You must work fast at this point or you'll end up with mashed potatoes with a scrambled egg mixed in and no one wants that. Mash and stir quickly to mix the egg throughout. It adds a beautiful yellow tone to the potato as well as a bit of fluffiness. To put a little more color on the plate I boiled baby carrots with the potatoes, removed them prior to mashing and drenched them in butter.
One plate of this was so filling that I skipped dessert, and that rarely happens, and the leftovers made three lunches for work.
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