Hello, friends of the Interwebs!!
My apologies for the massive delay since my last post. I have several excuses for my slacker ways:
1) I had actually pre-written and scheduled several blog entries to post before Christmas and then shortly thereafter. None of them managed to post, of course, but I’ve not had time to mess around with the software to see why that happened. And, what’s even more fun is that most of them were worded such that it wouldn’t make sense chronologically to just post them all now without doing some tweaking. So, that’s that.
2) I got sick. Really sick. But, at least I was already off of work for the five days of illness. Granted, it was during the two-week Christmas break I’d looked forward to all year, but I’m grateful I at least wasn’t sick on Christmas Day.
3) I got a new phone and my many, many, many pictures for the blog tutorials were on my old phone. I thought it was going to be as easy as just taking the SD card from my old phone and then using that to upload them all to my computer. Of course it couldn’t be that easy. It turns out that my pictures all saved to the phone itself—not the actual SD card—so I am systematically going through and moving them from the phone to the card, then to my laptop. I have to do it in small (well, 300 photos at a time) batches because it turns out my SD card doesn’t hold much in the big scheme of things. Only about 2,000 more files to move over and then I’ll have a good collection to work with.
4) We had non-stop guests rotating in and out for roughly two weeks, culminating in the Glorious Christmas Party for which I cooked for around 50-60 guests. That alone earns me some forgiveness for being a slacker on the blog front.
5) My new monogrammed dog products sold like crazy for Christmas (YAY!) and I’m the one who makes each of them myself. That was incredibly time consuming, but exciting nonetheless!
6) I’m working to kick off another company. Stay tuned for that.
OK, enough with all of the excuses. On to the more important thing here: food. Not just any food, but…wait for it…taco meatloaf! Yes, you read that correctly. That would be deliciousness upon deliciousness. You can’t go wrong with that. To combine two of my favorite foods into one dish just seems almost criminal.
I have been on a cooking frenzy lately and this is the latest in a series of tasty delights (I’ll post the rest of the recipes later). It came about because I got a fantastic deal on meat the other day. It was basically half price, but only if you bought five different kinds of meat. So, I had to go to the cookbook stash to figure out what I was going to do with it all. I made two amazing pots of yummy soup, a batch of taco puffs, and tonight, taco meatloaf. And I still have to use up the bacon. (Trust me. It won’t be hard to figure out how to make that disappear.)
Amongst my library of cookbooks (Doc makes fun of me for how many I have and for the fact I read them like regular books, but I think they’re fascinating and have so much to learn in them), one of my favorite go-tos is the Taste of Home Grand Prize Winners. The recipes may not be as gourmet as what some of my other cookbooks offer, but that’s why I like it. It’s just real food that’s delicious and oh-so-easy to make. The fancy stuff can wait for special occasions.
So, without further adieu, here’s the recipe:
Taco Meatloaves
3 eggs, lightly beaten
2 cups picante sauce, divided
1 can (16 ounces) kidney beans, rinsed and drained
1 can (11 ounces) Mexicorn, drained
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cans (2-1/4 ounces each) sliced ripe olives, drained
3/4 cup dry bread crumbs
1 envelope taco seasoning
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon chili powder
2 pounds ground beef
2 cups (8 ounces) shredded cheddar cheese
Additional picante sauce, optional
In a large bowl, combine the eggs, 1/2 cup picante sauce, beans, corn, onion, olives, bread crumbs, taco seasoning, cumin and chili powder. Crumble beef over mixture and mix well.
Pat into two ungreased 9-in. x 5-in. loaf pans. Bake, uncovered, at 350° for 50-55 minutes or until no pink remains and a meat thermometer reads 160°.
Spoon remaining picante sauce over each meat loaf; sprinkle with cheese. Bake 10-15 minutes longer or until cheese is melted. Let stand for 10 minutes before slicing. Serve with additional picante sauce if desired.
Yield: 2 meat loaves (6 servings each).
This obviously makes a lot of meatloaf, so I plan on eating one right away and freezing the other for later. I love it when I don’t have to think much or work at making dinner, so having one to freeze and enjoy later speaks my language.
Meanwhile, of course I took some pictures along the way…
Here are all of the ingredients required. I had to chop up some onion for the taco puffs I made yesterday & only needed part of it, so I kept the rest for use here. That’s why you don’t see an actual onion. Oh, and I needed to use up both some ground sirloin and some meatloaf mix, so I used both in this recipe. Also, I just did one can of olives that was roughly the size of two of the smaller cans. I think it provided plenty and was slightly cheaper that way. In the batch I made, I did half as much cumin as the recipe called for and one-fourth as much chili powder. I do not like a lot of heat. Flavor, yes, but not heat. So, between that reduced amount and what’s in the taco seasoning, I think it was just right.
So, I have this thing about raw eggs and meat. I find both to be nasty. Necessary, but nasty. What made this whole cooking experience particularly interesting is that when I cracked the first egg, some of the egg spilled out and dropped straight onto my bare foot. I had to curl my toes upwards to keep the gooey egg pooled on top of my foot while I hopped across the kitchen to where the paper towels are stored. Not fun, people. Not fun. I recommend avoiding that if you can.
One thing that was really fun about this dish is all of the colors. This is everything but the picante & meat mixed in. Oh, and one note here: be sure to use a gigantic bowl for this recipe. You will not be able to make this in your KitchenAid, unless you have an industrial-sized one at your disposal. I know I’m in for some serious cooking when I pull this bowl out. To put it in perspective, the one slightly smaller than this is the one I use for making mashed potatoes. I can usually make about 5-lbs. in it. It is a serious bowl. I love it! (Incidentally, it’s one of my first kitchen purchases as an adult. When I moved to Raleigh after college and had almost zero money, I went to a warehouse store & got a few basics. They had this great set of ceramic bowls for $25. To this day, it remains one of my best purchases ever.)
And then I threw on the picante for even more color! Ole!
Incidentally, a good friend assures me that they do not say “ole!” in Mexico, but I still imagine it to be shouted on the streets, in restaurants, in homes, in the open market, and in fields aplenty. Basically, in my head it’s like the music in the “Sound of Music”. But in Spanish. And it’s the word “ole!” filling the air…with light mariachi music (if there is such a thing as light mariachi music) serving as a subtle background track. Sure, I have been to Mexico a couple of times & didn’t experience anything remotely similar to what I’ve just described, but I think I may have just been in the wrong part of the country.
This is everything but the beef mixed together. If not for the raw egg, I think it’d be pretty tasty at this point alone. It smells amazing. Oh, but the dry taco seasoning and dry bread crumbs may not be as appetizing as one would hope. I guess it is important to finish making the recipe to the very end instead of stopping at this stage.
At this point, I had to put down the camera and deal with the raw beef. It was while dealing with the raw beef that my shirt sleeves decided they no longer wanted to stay pushed up my arms, so I ended up with raw meat stuck to the cuffs of the black sweater I’m wearing. That was just delightful. But, this was the end result of that debacle; well, this and a sweater that now needs to be dry cleaned ASAP:
Sometimes I amaze myself. And I give myself little pats on the back when I do. This was one of those times. Somehow I managed to get both loaves weighing the EXACT same just from eyeballing how much meatloaf mixture to put in each pan. I patted in what looked like about half of the mixture into each of the ungreased pans & then got looking at them. They looked so identical that I had to see how similar they were. I put them on the kitchen scale and about had a heart attack from glee when I saw that they were indeed identical! It’s the little things, people…
So, I put my perfectly halved loaves in the oven, and this is what came out 55 minutes later:
I hate that nasty stuff on top, so I was more than happy to move on to the next step: covering the tops with picante sauce--
And then it was time to do what I consider to be one of the most exciting things in cooking: topping it with cheese. Now, not only do I look forward to this because, well, we’re talking about cheese here, but also because topping something with cheese usually means you’re nearing the finish line. I will say that it seemed like an unusually large amount of cheese to fit on each loaf. But I wasn’t complaining. Oh, and I used triple cheddar instead of just plain regular cheddar. Why? Because three is better than one. Especially when we’re talking cheese. That’s why.
The oven, however, is a whole other story. It is complaining. Apparently I should have put a pan on the rack underneath these babies, as the cheese and picante went over the top edge of one of them & left a lovely mess in the bottom of the oven…where it will sit until the next time I talk Miss Deloris into cleaning the oven because I reallllllllly don’t like to.
And there you have it: two deliciously perfect taco meatloaves! Now, if you’ll please pardon me while I go and work away at devouring one of these…
