My Meat Loaf, Myself

These posts to date have perhaps too often involved guilty eating or thoughts on dieting, and while that's true to what frequently goes through my mind and defines my days, it's only part of the picture -- and only part of the book.

I celebrate and wallow in food at least as often as I feel nervous about overdoing it, and to that end I have lately developed a bit of fixation on meat loaf: on my mother's simple, retro, cheesy (not literally) but strangely yummy meat loaf, to be exact.

I'm not much of a cook, but her meat loaf (probably a recipe adapted from something on the back of a soup can) was one of the first "entrees," to be generous to it, that I succeeded in making when I began to try my hand in the kitchen in my early 20s.

It was also the dish that sort of put me off cooking for a good long while, because it's what was in the oven during an Oscar night dinner party 9 years ago when my inattentiveness and sloppiness led to a kitchen fire, an electrical short and, all in all, culinary disaster. My guests left hungry that night.

So it was with considerable trepidation that I returned to this meat loaf a little more than a week ago. I rounded up the ingredients -- ground beef (I went with sirloin, and definitely NOT the lean variety), tomato sauce, a big onion to be minced, and many other, lesser players --- then came home and, right away . . . problems! I forgot the bread crumbs. I didn't have the right size baking/casserole dish. Etc.

But I improvised, and found on the tail end that my improvisations, most of them intuitive and logical, worked. The meat loaf was terrific. My two dinner guests had seconds. So did I. No one left the table hungry.

Last night I loafed anew, this time trying to correct the mistakes that necessitated the improvisations and this time trying half pork with half beef. The combination definitely created a meat loaf with more flavor, more character, but it wasn't as tender and smooth and luscious at Meat Loaf No. 1.

Was the pork the difference? Or, in terms of the less tender and coarser quality, were the bread crumbs to blame. ONCE AGAIN I forgot to buy any, and while I'd adjusted the first time around by toasting slices of innocuous white bread and then smashing the toast into crumbs, this time around I had only a thicker multi-grain bread at hand. So I toasted and turned IT into crumbs. Did it substantially affect the resulting loaf?

It's a meat loaf muddle, a meat loaf mystery! But since I'm planning to press on with my loafy journey, the answers could well reveal themselves. Before I go back to this basic meat loaf, however, I'm feeling the tug of a whole new recipe, and I'm in the mood for LAMB. I could be loafing for many months at this rate.