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Tuesday, June 14, 2005
oh, quit bothering me with your 'title' nonsense already
Yesterday I was in serious need of a comfort-food kind of dinner, so I made the following:
****
Ingredients:
1 c milk
3/4 c Italian-seasoned bread crumbs
4 large mushrooms
1/3 of a large yellow onion
1 large clove garlic
1 carrot, shredded or grated
1 t salt
1/2 t pepper
sprinkling of parsley
2 beaten eggs
2 lb lean ground beef
1 package brown gravy mix
2 T sherry
Soak crumbs in milk. Finely mince garlic, onion, and mushroom (I use my Pampered Chef chopper, which has seen better days, but still works fine), and sauté together until soft in a little bit of butter or oil. Add to milk and crumbs, along with carrot, salt, pepper, and eggs. Mix together, then add meat and knead with hands until well-mixed (Eew! gross! but if you try to use a spoon you'll be there all day). Shape into loaves or put into pans and bake at 350 degrees until an internal temperature of 160° is reached -- about an hour and a quarter. Slice and serve with gravy, which you mix according to package directions, except replace 2T of the water with the sherry.
****
Now, most people would call that meatloaf. However, I call it large rectangular meatballs which I happen to serve sliced with gravy. That way my husband will eat it. I also made twice-baked potatoes, which are SO YUMMY (halve baked potatoes and scoop out most of their innards; mix said innards with sour cream, butter, crumbled cooked bacon, and garlic and onion cooked WITH the bacon; replace in potato shells and top with grated cheese; bake till hot). I warned T when he called from work that I was making two of his least favorite foods for supper, but it ended up that he took seconds of everything. I think the earth's axis tilted a little bit; did you feel it?
Then, as much as I wanted to stay home and power through an entire half-gallon of Dulce de Leche ice cream, I couldn't. I had a meeting of the board of directors for our community chorus. (someday it might look kind of good on a resumé or whatever, that I am on the board of directors for something. Which is funny, since the reason I got the job was that I was one of only six people to show up at a planning meeting once, a few years ago. Everyone who went to that meeting is on the board of directors. That'll teach me to show up for stuff...). Usually these meetings are really, really boring, in that usual sort of Robert's-Rules-accompanied "I wonder if anyone would notice if I pulled Persuasion out of my purse and started reading it under the table" kind of head-exploding, frustrating way. And there was a good deal of that sort of thing -- why does it take us an hour to verbally go over a budget that we all have PRINTED OUT IN FRONT OF OUR FACES, for example. But last night things got enlivened by a lovely little shouting match between the chairman and the scholarship committee person, and since none of the rest of us had anything more than the vaguest idea of what they were talking about, we basically had to just sit there open-mouthed while the WWF Senior Tour had its first major smackdown right in the chairman's living room. And it wasn't pretty.
Funny how I wasn't feeling depressed anymore when I got home, though. I wonder what that says about me. (probably it helps a whole lot that the kids cleaned the kitchen while I was gone, but still.) Today I have a raging headache, but I seem to have shoved really hard against the sides of my chute, if I'm not climbing back up yet, at least I don't think I'm going down either. God works in strange ways sometimes.
Comments
Wow, that is tricky -- rectangular meatballs. Meat-cubes? Good for you.
Nothing like a smackdown in someone else's living room. Oh yeah, and did you know that they are the WWE now? Yep, World Wildlife Federation finally went after 'em and made them change it. World Wrestling (or as it's called here in Nebraska, rasslin'. I guess that would make it WRE then.) ENTERTAINMENT. A more fitting name, I would think.
Glad you're feeling a bit better.
Posted by: mary at June 14, 2005 12:29 PM
Just to clarify, it's meatloaf. :) See, T grew up eating, say, burnt or underdone frozen pot pies, or meatloaf that was basically hamburger and oatmeal cooked in a brick and slathered with ketchup. As soon as he reached adulthood, he swore he would never eat certain things ever again: scalloped potatoes (or any potatoes with anything besides butter and salt on them), meatloaf, chicken pot pie, vegetables cooked from a frozen state, etc. Over the years that I've been cooking for him, I've tried periodically to convince him that just because he was tortured with bad food for the first sixteen years of his life doesn't mean that there's no such thing as a good version of the foods he had to eat then whether he wanted to or not. So now it's kind of a tongue-in-cheek wink-wink joke for the two of us -- I can make chicken pot pie but he calls it cobbler. He likes meatballs; hence, we call meatloaf "big rectangular meatballs" (the recipe is EXACTLY THE SAME, as I have pointed out to him many many times) and he doesn't have to go back on his word if he decides to like it. No, I did not make cubical meatballs. :)
Posted by: Rachel at June 14, 2005 12:48 PM
I happen to like getting elbow deep in burger meat. Who wants to use a spoon? Glad you're feeling better.
Posted by: jenn at June 14, 2005 06:13 PM
