Red Pesto Meatloaf

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!

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.

Introducing "Obiter Dictum"

Family and friends often suggest that I write about two of my greatest passions – travel and food – so, I've created this blog to do just that, and a lot more.  Obiter dictum, which means “an incidental or passing remark, an opinion”, will include tales of my travels from the planning stages to the adventures themselves.  Plenty will be said about food, whether it's a cool little restaurant discovered while traveling or something created during one of my brief moments of domestic culinary genius (ha!). To keep the content interesting for both of us, I'll post television and film reviews and editorials addressing current events. I hope you'll join me on this new adventure...