Every week we’ll post a recipe that we both made. This week’s recipe was Meatloaf, found over at Mennonite Girls Can Cook. Printable recipe can be found at the bottom of this post.

Robyn’s Take:

This week’s recipe was my choice, and it came about when I said to Fred “I need to choose a recipe for next week. What do you want to eat?” and he said “We haven’t had meatloaf in a long time!” and I said “Hmm. I have a meatloaf recipe in my stack!”, and I shuffled through my six foot high stack of recipes-to-try, and found this one.

I mean, seriously – a hunk of meat mixed with a bunch of good stuff and then topped with ketchup, BBQ sauce and brown sugar? Sign me up!

Ingredients: BBQ sauce (I used Bulls-eye because that’s what was in the fridge), ketchup, oats, bread crumbs (I have a Panko bread crumbs addiction and I buy them whenever they’re on sale. I probably have like 10 boxes of bread crumbs in my pantry.), grated Parmesan (I buy the pre-grated big-ass container from Sam’s. Don’t tell me how freshly grated Parm is 73 times better, I haven’t got time for the pain.), milk, onion, and 1 1/4 pounds of lean ground beef.

Throw everything in a big bowl, like such:

And squoosh it together with your hands until it’s well mixed.

What do people who don’t like to touch raw meat with their bare hands do when they’re making meatloaf? Use a mixer? Don gloves?

So the recipe says to form the meat into a loaf and put it on a baking sheet. Instead of doing that, I opted to use my fancypants meatloaf pan. You can’t tell from the picture, but it’s a pan with holes in the bottom set inside a larger pan that will catch the grease that drops from the top pan. Don’t be jealous of my high society ways.

So I was MINDING my own damn business, mixing up the topping for the meatloaf when what happens? Here comes that INSPECTOR again, all “Out of my way! I gots to inspect!”

“Big hunk of meat and cheese in pan. I approve! BUT there’s onion in there, so I cannot have a bite. Sixty-three demerits for you!”

“Counter seems clear. Ten points for you. BUT WAIT…”

“What’s all this crap over here? It’s ALMOST like you just shoved all the crap to one side of the counter for picture-taking, like your readers are going to BELIEVE you are organized and neat. TEN THOUSAND demerits for thinking the readers are that stupid, and another hundred million demerits for leaving chocolate where Inspector Stompers might accidentally eat it. Are you trying to poison Inspector Stompers??”

“Bowl of ketchup and BBQ sauce. This is a nice touch.”

“But you forgot the brown sugar, stupid.” (I seriously forgot the brown sugar. Like, I JUST NOW realized I forgot it! Grrrr.)

“And ketchup on the counter. Another 16 demerits for slobbery. You shut this operation down!”

Once again, I bribed the inspector with crunchies and packed him off for nap time so I could get this done.

BBQ sauce/ ketchup mixture, dumped over the top of the meatloaf:

And baked for an hour. This is what it looked like when it was done:

It’s impossible to get a decent picture of meatloaf. I didn’t hardly even try, obviously. (Now just watch, Nance is going to post a picture of the most beautiful meatloaf ever. DAMN HER.)

The verdict? Holy crap, it was good. SO good. We ate it for dinner one night, had leftovers for dinner the next night, and we both had it for lunch. Two thumbs up, and it’s going into regular rotation, I can tell you that.

I bet it’ll be even better when I remember to put the brown sugar in the topping!

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Nance’s take:

True Confession Time: I have spent the last 3 days stuck in an Internet rabbit hole because hello, Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, Divorce and Scientology! Please tell me that I’m not the only one that has lost hours of precious time reading up on The Crazy That Is Scientology. How can I even think about making a meatloaf when I had to watch an incredible documentary about Scientology (BBC television – the reporter has a fabulous accent)?  I have read and watched so much stuff about it that I am starting to get a little bit nervous that the Xenu people may be following my IP address and OHMYHELL, RUN, NANCE, RUN!

Yeah, I am probably a little crazy right now.  But I did manage to finally make the meatloaf (yesterday morning). And for the record, meatloaf in July is a HORRIBLE IDEA, ROBYN.

I buy my ground beef at Sam’s Club and break it down into smaller bags (approximate weight is one pound). If you think that I actually measured/weighed the meat for these bags or this recipe, you don’t know me at all. Here’s another little secret about me: This picture is totally pissing me off because Rick had the audacity to write on the bags…IN HIS HORRIFYING HANDWRITING. Rick knows better. I have rewritten entire grocery lists rather than walk around the store looking at his handwriting if he had added something to the list. Yeah, you may call it being a bitch, but I prefer to say that it’s just being particular. Heh.

I did not understand the need to foil my pan. But I went with it since I normally just throw my meatloaf into a bread pan. I was determined to follow this recipe to the letter because I was hoping it would be a meatloaf that everyone in my family would eat.  My son Trey doesn’t like meatloaf because it’s old people food.  Shirley just laughs, but I am deeply offended because I love meatloaf and I’m not that OLD!  Hmph.

There’s not much to write about when it comes to a meatloaf recipe. I just started dumping all the stuff into the bowl. And then I hit a road-block…

The recipe calls for one cup of grated cheese. Well. What KIND of grated cheese? I went back to the site and even stalked the comment section to see if anyone had asked about the cheese. Nope. It appears that this group is in the know about the cheese situation and doesn’t want to let anybody else in on the secret. Robyn and I do not usually discuss the recipes that we make, but I broke down and sent an email this time.

N:  What kind of grated cheese did you use for the meatloaf?

R:  We used parmesan because we had a big-ass container of pre-shredded stuff (from Sam’s), but I think cheddar would have been good, too.

N:  do you think I should you parmesan from a can (that Kraft shit?)

R:  Oh, I wouldn’t use that stuff. I’d use any other kind of cheese you have laying around (don’t tell me you don’t have cheese laying around).

I never received her last reply until it was too late. Way TOO LATE.  And check her out, accusing me and assuming that I have cheese laying around.  Which I do.  But STILL. I didn’t want to have to grate it.

I didn’t even have enough to make one cup so I had to figure something out. And for the record my mother was not very helpful. Had it been her making this recipe she probably would have added a can of baked beans to it and called it a day.  The really sad part of this is that most of you think I’m joking right now.

I ended up just adding bread crumbs to the cheese that was in the measuring cup until it was a full cup.

THIS is how you mix meatloaf. And meatballs. And any other kind of ground beef that needs mixing. Just don’t do it too much or you’ll toughen your meat. I don’t know if that’s true or not.  All I know is that I make sure I don’t mix the hell out of it because that rule is stuck in my brain and now it’ll probably be stuck in yours. You’re WELCOME.

And shut-up about my man hands.  I know.

Make it into a loaf (or a flattened football if your name is Nance) and put an indentation in the center. I sorta kinda made a meatloaf bowl, huh?

Yeah, yeah, blah, blah. By this time I wasn’t very interested because my mother was in the kitchen and I was pontificating about something important I’m sure. Like how fed up I am with the political bullshit that is showing up on my Facebook. I was raised that you should never talk about politics, religion and sex in mixed company. Apparently all the rules of polite society go out the window when it comes to Facebook.  And, of course, I’m being a hypocrite and I’m well aware that I have “shared” some political stuff on my Facebook.  That’s not the point.  The point was that I was in the mood to pontificate and I had a captive audience.  And also, meatloaf = boring.

I wish I had a pretty brush to show you how I painted this damn meatloaf with the glaze. Secret: I have the brush planted in the glaze so you can’t see how bristly and unkempt it  really is. I’m being all sneaky with my photography!

As you can see, I flunked art in first grade and it never got any better after that.

This is what it looked like when I pulled it out of the oven. When I saw this I just had to laugh and it certainly explains the need for foil. Look at the cracks all up in that meatloaf! And that burnt glaze! I’m thinking I just failed home ec. with this recipe. What do they call Home Ec. now? It used to be Home Economics back in my high school days. It’s a class where the girls (and the occasional guy) learned how to cook and sew.  I wonder if they even have it anymore.

Ugly meatloaf stays ugly.

Horrifying to look at, but pretty good to eat!  Everyone liked it so it’s a keeper.