I’m sorry but that’s what it looks like when it comes out of the oven…

A few months back, at home on a wet weekend, we were aimlessly channel surfing – which is kinda hard to do here since we’ve only got about 14 channels to surf – when we stumbled across The Pioneer Woman show. I think it may have been on Choice TV. Normally I might have lifted my eyes from what I was doing for about two whole milliseconds but my ears pricked up at the mention of The Pioneer Woman because I have heard so much about her on Five Crooked Halos and I paid attention – so did Carmen who is normally not a meat loaf person (I think meat loaf – the food and the singer – rocks and don’t understand why it has such a ‘down’ rep other than some people seem to think that it is poor people’s food). And this is no normal meat loaf…

We tried it immediately and have done several times since – this is the Rolls Royce of meat loaf but no more difficult nor complex to make than normal boring meatloaf…you can see The Pioneer Woman’s way on her blog but here’s our take on it:

Ingredients

•  Meatloaf:
  • 1 cup Whole Milk
  • 6 slices White any kind of Bread – we just use our normal wholemeal homemade loaf and none of that nonsense about shuicking the crusts!
  • 2 pounds 1 kg Ground Beef mince for Kiwis
  • 1 cup (heaped) freshly grated Parmesan Cheese
  • 1/4 teaspoon seasoned Salt – we use garlic salt but you need to add at least a teaspoon to have any appreciable effect
  • 3/4 teaspoons Salt
  •  Freshly Ground Black Pepper
  • 1/3 cup Minced Flat-leaf Parsley – we have both sorts in the garden – either will do
  • 4 whole Eggs, Beaten
  • 10 slices thin/regular Bacon – maybe a little more as we like to wrap a strip around the base to help hold it all together.
•  Sauce:
  • 1-1/2 cup Ketchup tomato sauce – we actually got some hickory ketchup specially for this dish but you don’t need to do this – good old Watties tomato sauce does the trick nicely
  • 1/3 cup Brown Sugar
  • 1 teaspoon Dry Mustard
  •  Tabasco To Taste (keep adding this til the sauce is tangy)

Method

I made this on Thursday night as we had some defrosted mince and bacon in the fridge that had to be used or it would have been canine gourmet time. It was a bit spur of the moment and I suppose I could have found something else to make that used both but once I had my heart (or stomach?) set on this, it was going to happen…

I only had 500 grams of mince (for the third world that has yet to convert to metricalism that’s just over a pound) and no milk ( it was after 7 in the evening and the garage in National Park was closed – the next closest dairy was 30-40 km away) so I halved most of the ingredients above but replaced the fluid of the milk by keeping the eggs at four and replaced the bread (it was about now I realised that I hadn’t put on another loaf of bread since finishing the last one) with a couple of cups of breadcrumbs (made from our homemade bread so close enough!) I keep most of the spices at the same level as the original as I think that the Pioneer Woman tends to under-spice this dish…

Here’s how it looks once sliced – cooked properly, the sauce will caramelise all over the outside and become a delicious chewy crust with the bacon. It was absolutely delissimo served with mashed kumara, carrot and potato (all combined together in about equal quantities – once again, making the best use of what was in the fridge before it time-expired)…and leaving plenty for sammies and snacks over the next few days…

I thought of submitting this as my entry in this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge ‘Masterpiece’ but I might think some more about my approach to that…it is a pretty damn fine meatloaf though but ‘masterpiece’? I’m not too sure yet…