My Favorite Meatloaf by Heather

My favorite meatloaf is comfort food, especially with a side of mashed potatoes and gravy. My mother-in-law's recipe is one of the best I've ever tasted! 

Meatloaf gets a bad rap.  Always has and I don’t know why!  It’s like a big hamburger patty in a pan and everyone loves a juicy hamburger, right?  Personally, I prefer the meatloaf because I am not a huge fan of hamburger buns.  And I can take a bite of mashed potatoes with every bite of meatloaf.  Try that with a burger.  

My best meatloaf recipe comes from my mother-in-law and, like her, it will never do you wrong. I don’t know where she got the recipe, but my copy is splattered from years of use, in my recipe binder, in her handwriting. A true treasure.

This year has been a difficult one for my mother-in-law as she cares at home for my father-in-law who has become almost completely bedridden. For a while hospice was coming in three days a week, such was his state of ill health, but hospice will only continue coming if the patient continues to decline. So the very good news is that he has stabilized. And the bad news is that he is no longer entitled to the care they give. 

So lately, she has had to hire nurses to help her a couple of times a week. She’ll turn 79 in a little more than a month, so all of this is hard on her alone and she does much that would exhaust even a younger person.

I am so proud of her and the good grace she demonstrates.  My mother-in-law has always called me daughter, not daughter-in-law, and that makes a world of difference. Another thing I can say about her is that she is an adventurous cook and eater.  She regularly cuts recipes out of her local newspaper or magazines and gives them a try, just for something new.  She claims not to be a good cook, but she produces some amazing meals.  Like this meatloaf.  She is also beautiful and funny and loving.  I want to be her when I grow up.

My Favorite Meatloaf

I made and photographed this when we had just moved and I didn’t have a loaf pan, so you will see how I improvised. By all means, use a normal loaf pan if you have one.

Ingredients
 2 slices white bread (I use brown sandwich bread when we have no white, which is most of time.)
1/4 cup or 60ml milk
1 small onion
2 eggs
1 1/2 lbs or 680g ground beef
1/2 lb or 230g ground pork
2 tablespoons horseradish (Or omit if you can’t find any and increase the mustard powder to 2 teaspoons – story of my life)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup or 60ml ketchup
1 teaspoon dry mustard powder (like Coleman’s)

Method
Preheat your oven to 400°F or 200°C.

Rip the bread into rough pieces and, in a small bowl, pour the milk over it, pushing the pieces down into the milk.  Soak until all the milk is absorbed.

Chop your onion finely.

Mash the soggy bread with a fork and then add to a large bowl with all of the other ingredients.  Mix well.

Tip the lot into a loaf pan or into a piece of foil that you will form into the shape of a loaf pan, inside a larger pan.

Bake for about an hour or until the meatloaf is browned nicely.

Serve along with some rich mashed potatoes, gravy and the vegetable of your choice.   I am telling you what, this meatloaf is GOOD!

Enjoy!

Birthday Party Pancake Muffins #MuffinMonday

Perfect for whatever your celebrations, these Birthday Party Pancake Muffins have all the flavor of chocolate chip pancakes but are much easier to make and serve! Bake some today!

 

Our Muffin Monday recipe for today was a pancake muffin with maple syrup and a streusel topping.   Which sounded delightful. But at our house, the pancake of choice, especially when the girls had slumber parties, always included either little chocolate chips or mini M&Ms and not a drizzle of syrup.   So I decided that if I were going to make pancake muffins, I’d better do it right.

I was baking these on Saturday in preparation for posting on Monday and we were indeed celebrating a birthday, although, sadly, without a gaggle of giggling girls sleeping over. And I learned a new term: Golden Birthday. I guess the whole world knows what that is but I had never heard it before. 

It was my elder daughter’s Golden Birthday, which means that she turned 22 on the 22nd.  It also means that my grandmother is now 99 years old! 

She and my daughter share a birthday and a special bond, as she was the first great-grandchild. So I offer you these special birthday party pancake muffins in celebration of two very special birthdays. Perhaps there is someone in your family that needs celebrating too? Make them these!

Birthday Party Pancake Muffins

This recipe is adapted from one on Bakingdom, a recipe blog that is no longer online. The link above is from the Wayback Machine where you can still see the original post. If you were a follower and are curious about what happened to Bakingdom, check out this post from BakingHow.

Ingredients
For the muffins:
2 cups or 250g all-purpose flour
1/4 cup or 50g vanilla sugar (or 1/4 cup sugar and 2 teaspoons vanilla extract)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup or 180ml buttermilk
1 egg
1/2 cup or 113g unsalted butter, melted and cooled to room temperature
3/4 cup or 150g mini M&Ms

For the topping:
1/4 cup or 50g mini M&Ms
1/2 cup or 115g Nutella

Method
Preheat the oven to 350°F or 180°C.  Grease and flour a 12-cup muffin pan or fill it with paper liners.


Combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl.

In a smaller bowl, whisk together your buttermilk, eggs, butter and vanilla (if using.)

Add the wet ingredients to the dry and stir until just combined.

Fold in the first lot of mini M&Ms.

Divide the batter between the muffin cups and bake about 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Allow to cool for about five minutes then remove the muffins from the pan and cool completely on a rack.

Fill a decorating bag with Nutella and pipe it all over the muffins.  (If you don’t have a decorating bag, put the Nutella in a Ziploc bag and cut a tiny hole in one corner.)

Top with the second lot of mini M&Ms.  Now don't those looks just like a party, but for breakfast?

Enjoy!

Pin these Birthday Party Pancake Muffins!

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Ham and Split Pea Soup

Hands up if you like shopping in foreign grocery stores when you go away on holiday?  Or even just a different store in your hometown on occasion?  I knew I liked you!  The best part of exploring is finding items that you love, but are not typical to your locale.  For me, poking about in food stores is like an adventure hunt and when I find treasure, I can generally buy because, unless we are talking truffles or caviar, most grocery items are quite affordable.  Take, for example, my stock cube collection.

You see here just a few of my purchases from Brazil, Malaysia, Spain, and the United Kingdom among other places.  I love to use stock cubes instead of salt because they add flavor as well as saltiness to dishes.  (And, yes, most contain MSG, but no one in my family is in the small percentage of the population that has an intolerance to this flavor enhancer.)  In this soup, I used a ham cube because I didn’t have a ham bone to boil to make my own broth, but I wanted to share this in case you have a bone-in Christmas ham.  Ham and split pea soup is delicious and a great use of leftover ham.  This will make two or three hearty bowls but is easily doubled to feed more. Just double the other ingredients and boil your ham bone for longer, with more water.

Ingredients
1 medium onion
1 medium carrot
Olive oil
1 1/2 cups or 300g dried green split peas
1 ham stock cube or 1 teaspoon salt and 1 ham bone
8 – 9 oz or 225-255g leftover ham
Black pepper

Method
If you don’t happen to have a ham stock cube, put your ham bone in a pot of water with the teaspoon of salt and bring to a boil.  Simmer covered for about one hour or until all the meat is falling off the bone.  Turn off the heat and remove the bone from the pot and allow to cool enough for you to take all the ham off the bone and discard (Read: feed to your helper dog.) the grizzly bits.  Set aside.

Peel and chop your onion and carrot.  Cut your ham (either from the simmered bone or from leftover boneless ham or both!) into pieces.

In another pot (or for those of you with a ham stock cube, the only pot) sauté the onion and carrot in a little olive oil until the onion is translucent.

Add in your dried split peas and the ham cube along with about six cups or 1 1/2 liters of water (or stock from your recently boiled ham bone, if using and skip the cube.)  Give the pot a good couple of grinds of black pepper from your pepper mill.

Bring to a low boil and skim the scum off of the top of the pot with a shallow spoon.

Cook over a low to medium heat until the split peas are cooked through and are turning soft.  This could take as few as 30 minutes or as much as an hour, depending on the freshness of your dried split peas.

At this point, if you would like a very smooth soup, you can puree it in a blender or with a hand blender straight in the pot but do be careful not to scald yourself.   I prefer a chunkier soup so I just use a whisk straight in the pot to break up the split peas somewhat, while leaving some relatively intact.

Add in the ham pieces and simmer for another 20-30 minutes.  Stir occasionally and watch for scorching because once the split peas have broken down, they tend to catch on the bottom of the pot.  Add some more water if your soup is getting thicker than you like.

Check for seasoning and add a little more salt if necessary.  Give the whole pot another good sprinkle of freshly ground black pepper.

Enjoy!