Ma! The Meatloaf!

Nothing says love like "bacon lattice."

Welcome to all my new subscribers! You’ve motivated me to start actually updating my Substack. Around here, we’re slightly more than recipes, but those are what everyone wants, so I’ll give you one as I build the editorial calendar out a little further.

Notably, I do not always do personal walk-throughs of my recipe through text, but as I strive not to have favorite students, I suppose you can always send a DM (or some high-quality cookware as a bribe) and I’ll try to do my best.

Anyway, we’re not only about chicken around here.

I get it. Meatloaf is controversial. But like Brussels Sprouts, we’ve made some improvements over our 1960s heirloom varietals that make the modern version somewhat more palatable. In both cases, we’ve both improved the quality of the core product, and added bacon, which adds flavor but also makes children 20% less likely to complain about food, given that they can eat the bacon and throw the rest on the floor for the dog.

This meatloaf is, itself, an heirloom. It started life in one of those spiral-bound family cookbooks with laminated, PrintShop covers that were all the rage in the 1990s, when busy families yearned for the days when mom or grandma would dump ten ingredients — at least one of them some sort of concentrated cream soup — into a container, pop it into the oven, and call it dinner.

In this case, though, we’ll get fancy. Grass fed beef. Bacon lattice. No ketchup.

Ma! The MEATLOAF!

1 1/2 lb ground beef

1 lb ground pork

2 TBSP milk, combined with 1/2 cup plain bread crumbs

2 TBSP chopped onion

1 clove garlic, chopped

1/2 cup fresh parsley, chopped or torn

2 eggs (works better if they’re scrambled, but I won’t boss you around)

2 tsp salt

Pinch of pepper

Preheat oven to 375.

Now, there are two ways to do this and it all depends on what kind of sensory aversions you have. Hate wet bread? Mush the meat with the chopped onion, garlic, parsley, eggs, and seasoning. Add the wet breadcrubs at the end and work to distribute them evenly inside the meat mix.

If you prefer not to touch meat, I’m sorry but you’re going to have to either suck it up, buttercup, or make a non-meatloaf meal. But you might be okay mixing the breadcrumbs with the milk and then adding that to a giant bowl, then adding the meat on top and mixing it all together haphazardly with literally any kitchen tool.

Anyway, shape it into a loaf and put it into a loaf pan. No need to grease the loaf pan. We’re about to do that and improve presentation in one fell swoop, with bacon.

Take four strips of raw bacon and lay them across your pan, lengthwise (long bacon strip parallel with the longer dimension of the loaf pan. Tuck one end of each bacon strip into the space between the meatloaf and the loaf pan. Now, using half strips of bacon, gently weave a bacon blanket for your loaf of meat, tucking the ends of each strip in between the pan and the loaf, like so.

Once the blanket is complete, pop the loaf into the oven for 30 minutes.

After 30 minutes, drop the temperature to 325 and bake for one hour and fifteen minutes.

Enjoy hot with the ketchup you didn’t put into the meatloaf or let it cool and eat with mayonnaise on white bread.