In this weekly series, home cook Bruce Watson works his way through a decades-old family cookbook, adapting the best recipes exclusively for Slashfood.
Going through my old family cookbook, I came across my Aunt Renie's recipe for blue cheese meatloaf. Like many of Renie's recipes, this one has a long pedigree and an old school gourmet touch. However, the original had a heavy touch of sage, which made the loaf fairly bland.
Experimenting with various sauces in my kitchen, I found that the meatloaf tasted amazing when served with a hearty dollop of barbecue sauce. My modified version, featured below, integrates the barbecue sauce into the meatloaf, along with a huge amount of blue cheese. This, combined with a shorter cooking time, yields a finished product that narrows the distance between meatloaf and paté. With that in mind, you might consider serving this dish with sliced pickles, mustard or other paté accompaniments!
Get the recipe for barbecue blue cheese meatloaf after the jump!
One of my favorite dishes as a child was meatloaf. I loved its rich meaty taste and cake-like consistency, and of course its combination with hot tomato sauce. Today however, I'm more interested in exploring the many different versions of the typical meatloaf, such as Stefánia Szelet, a Hungarian meatloaf baked with three hard boiled eggs in the middle.
Meatloaf dates back to Antiquity when Romans would make minced meat loaves. In fact, the Italian meatball is made in a strikingly similar way. The meatloaf that most Americans grow up eating is made from a mixture of ground pork and cornmeal. It has been part of American cuisine since colonial times and was brought over by Dutch and German settlers. Today, you can find meatloaves made with turkey meat instead of pork and beef. You can even make a vegetarian meatloaf.
When a friend of mine recently asked me to help throw her a baby shower, I had many questionable suggestions-- like making it race-car rather than baby themed (accepted) to making a baby-shaped red-velvet cake with gooey red filling, except the diaper part, which would have brown icing filling (rejected).
But one of the things she was most excited about was my suggestion that I make a meatcake. That is, a cake made of meat, an idea I had found (like so many nutty ideas) on the interwebs. I took the concept, but created my own recipes--two, since a non-red-meat eater needed turkey. It may sound peculiar but the result was delicious and even rather spectacular. If you want to try it yourself....
Reimagining leftovers can be tough. But sometimes they open a slew of options. Take meatloaf, for example. You can crumble it up into a spaghetti sauce, use it as meatballs, morph it into sloppy joes, crumble it on pizza, or make a rich and tasty meatloaf melt, like above.
This is jut some toast, a nice slice of meatloaf, a layer of freshly sauteed mushrooms and onions, and some cheese. Once compiled, it was thrown into the toaster until the cheese was nicely melted -- which was enough time for the meatloaf to warm. Old staples don't always have to be predictable!
From The Best of Taste: The Finest Food of Fifteen Nations (1957), The SACLANT-NATO Cookbook Committee
I'm interrupting the semi-regularly scheduled Midnight Sausage series to share molded food images and recipes from my personal collection of early-to-mid 20th century cookbooks. There will be aspic. There will be mousse. There will be various gelatins. All will be semi-solid and of debatable degrees of edibility.
Please feel free to shimmy and shake your way to the comments section to share your very own magical, masticable molds of yore.
For your lunchtime pleasure, I'm presenting a series of my favorite bento boxes. Bento are Japanese home-prepared meals served in special boxes, usually eaten for lunch at work or school. The boxes can range from austere lacquered trays to multi-tiered Hello Kitty confections of neon pink plastic. The meals themselves are anything from rice and leftovers to elaborate themed affairs of Pikachu-shaped dumplings with sesame seed eyes and carved radish trees. These days, bento enthusiasts from all over the world share their creations on Flickr.
Today's bento is a rather quizzical-looking owl, rendered in turkey meatloaf with carrot sauce details, on a background of parsley rice. Our feathered friend is accompanied by a green curry dumpling and several sesame fish cakes in similar tones of rust and green, giving the tableau a rather 70s rec room vibe. Let's hear it for our artist, Los Dragónnes.
Having worked in a bakery setting since I was 18, I've seen my share of groom's cakes. Actually, I had never heard of the groom's cake until I started working in a bakery. Most of them are chocolate cake with a golf or foot ball theme. My best friend's groom went with a caramel cake, which was very delicious. This one really takes the cake, though.
The Black Widow Bakery came up with the best groom's cake I've ever seen. There's not even any fru-fru cake to ruin the manliness of it. It's a meat cake. The layers are made up of meat loaf, with a special glaze filling, and mashed potato icing. The decorations were created with that same glaze, which is made from Worcestershire sauce , brown sugar, and ketchup.
All the details are here. I'm pretty amused by this cake. I actually think it's a really neat idea. Have you seen any really great groom's cakes recently?
I've seen meatloaf baked in bread pans and meatloaf baked in free form shapes (mock lobster, anyone?). But I've never seen anyone think to bake up a meatloaf in a tube pan until I was scanning through my RSS reader last night. But if anyone was going to think of a bundt meatloaf, I'm not surprised that it came from the minds of the chefs/bloggers behind the site Ideas in Food. They are always thinking creatively about food and manage to produce a number of interesting (and I'm sure tasty) dishes. I think that this is what I'd like to eat for dinner tonight.
Happy National Meatloaf Appreciation Day! If you haven't done so already, today is the time to take out your baking pans and your mom's (or dad's) recipe for meatloaf and put one together. Serious Eats (National Meatloaf Appreciation Day is their brainchild) is going to be posting meatloaf submissions throughout the day, so if you are looking for a little meatloaf inspiration, go check them out.
In order to get in the spirit of the holiday, I made not one, but two meatloafs. The first was a veggie-infused loaf that was close to what my mom used to serve when I was a kid. You can watch me make that one here. Another meatloaf I made strictly for Slashfood readers (and the happiness of my belly). Riffing on the traditional meatloaf recipe that calls for a variety of meats, I went with ground turkey and a Italian seasoned chicken sausage (1 pound each). Make sure to cut the sausage out of the casings and combine well with the turkey.
In a medium frying pan, I combined 1/3 chopped onion, 3 crushed cloves of garlic, 1/3 chopped green pepper, 2 chopped celery stalks (for crunch), one very finely grated potato (I used a microplane) and four large mushrooms, chopped (all chopping was done pretty finely). I cooked the veggies together just until they lost their rawness. I let them cool a little and then added them to the meat, along with a beaten egg, salt and pepper. I mashed it all together until combined and scooped it into a loaf pan. I baked it for about 50 minutes at 375 degrees. If you grate the potato finely enough, it gets really tender during baking, absorbing a lot of the juices. This one was a real winner.
When I was a kid, my mom only made meatloaf occasionally. It wasn't in the regular dinner rotation and so when we heard it was on the menu, instead of complaining (ala Randy in A Christmas Story, singing-songing "Meat-loaf, beet-loaf, I hate meat-loat."*) we'd celebrate. My mom made good meatloaf, filled with grated carrots and potatoes, seasoned with spaghetti sauce spices and baked in a white stoneware loaf pan (also the vessel for many a loaf of banana bread). It was the kind of meatloaf that got even better the next day and made a really excellent sandwich.
Serious Eats has declared October 18th National Meatloaf Appreciation Day. They are inviting everyone to participate in the festivities. It's easy to be involved in the celebration. All you have to do is make a meatloaf before October 16th and take a picture of your creation. If you have a blog, post the picture and recipe and send the link to the folks at SE. If you're not the blogging sort, send the picture and recipe to them via email (make sure to go over and check their post for the complete instructions). They'll put up a round-up of all the meatloaf creations on the 18th.
If we had had an Easter "Show Me Your Peeps" contest this month -- we didn't, but if we had -- there is no doubt in my mind that the grand prize winning Peep would have been the Peep that served as inspiration for Brian Shilling's Peepy Bunny meatloaf. Brian simply shaped his recipe for meatloaf into the Peeps bunny, used black olives for the eyes and nose, and baked away. Now, the final product was much, much darker than your regular neon pink or sunshine yellow Peep, but I think that's okay. I don't know if I could eat neon pink meatloaf, Peeps-shaped or otherwise.
When you hear the term "quick loaves," most home cooks will assume that it refers only to quick breads/cakes, especially if they like to bake. In the book Quick Loaves: 150 Breads and Cakes, Meat and Meatless Loaves, however, the term applies to all kinds of baked loaves, both sweet and savory. It is divided up into five main chapters. The first deals with the basics of loaf-making and, to ensure that every one of the recipes really is "quick," the author includes directions for some basic, homemade mixes, to which you can add just a few simple ingredients to turn out a number or different finished products. Most of the things made from the mixes are cakes and breads, but once you become familiar with the strategies that the author has used to turn them into very different things, you should be able to experiment with flavors a bit yourself. The following chapters deal with quickbreads and coffee cakes; cakes and other desserts; meatloaves; and vegetarian loaves (as main or side dishes). For the baked good lovers, Devil's Food Cake in Two Shakes and are good bets, while Quick-Mix Five-Ingredient Meatloaf and Thai Turkey Loaves will please those looking for something more substantial.
Perhaps you haven't noticed it because you are a victim of the phenomenon. You called up your girlfriends on your cotton candy pink cel phone adorned with sparkly cupcake-shaped charms, went out to get frozen yogurt topped with Cap'n Crunch cereal, and sat around talking about the "cuuuuuuutest" Hello Kitty makeup bag at Sephora and gossiping about "boys"...just like all the other junior high girls.
But wait. You're 35.
I was just reading an article about a new book called Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes, and the Reinvention of the American Grown-Up, in which author Christopher Noxon says very plainly, "'People all over are refusing to act their age." Basically, grown-ups are going through a period of regression back to their childhoods. Though his book talks about the trend from a broad perspective, I couldn't help but think how very true this trend is in food. I mean, how else do you explain a craze for cupcakes, those tiny treats that we ate as children in our homeroom birthday parties? What about the recent throwback to "retro" foods that many of us associate with growing up in mom's kitchen like macaroni and cheese, and meatloaf?
Are we regressing as a society? I know I am. Are you one of these grownups who still lives with his/her parents, postpones marriage, watches cartoons, all the while eating Hello Kitty Pop-tarts, dipping your dinosaur (chicken) nuggets in ketchup and having a Twinkie for desert? If so, what other "rejuvenile" foods are you eating?
A good meatloaf makes a great dinner, but it makes an even better sandwich the next day. I like to use barbecue sauce or ketchup to complement mine, but Jennifer, at Kiss the Hem of Her Apron used soy cheese and mustard to spice up her "meat"loaf sandwich. Soy cheese? I should mention that the delectable looking "meat"loaf that she made is completely vegan, from a recipe that she put together using the vegan loaf generator. Her loaf used primarily rice and beans for the base, but the generator allows you to put together a combination of many different ingredients, including soy-based meats, if you are so inclined to try. Whatever you make your meatloaf out of - beans or beef - a sandwich is surely the best place for it to end up.
No, this isn't just a meat cake because it has a T-bone steak in the icing. This is actually three layers of meatloaf and ketchup glaze frosted with mashed potatoes. So far, it's the only thing posted at BlackWidowBakery.com. The meat cake's creator says it was made for the wedding of friend who wanted "A guy's cake. Like..made out of meat." The meatloaf recipe looks pretty standard, as does the glaze. The mashed potatoes came from flakes, however, to ensure a smooth frosting. The results were "delicious" according to the baker. I wonder what the groom thought.
When a friend of mine recently asked me to help throw her a baby shower, I had many 
Perhaps you haven't noticed it because you are a victim of the phenomenon. You called up your girlfriends on your cotton candy pink cel phone adorned with sparkly cupcake-shaped charms, went out to get 
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