Beef | Shortbread

Meatloaf. It’s what’s for dinner. Or so I told my family. They weren’t thrilled at the idea, the husband having flashbacks of dry, tasteless meatloaf, and the children having flashes of television shows where meatloaf is the enemy of child-kind.

But the rule is ‘you have to taste it’ at my house, so they did. And guess what, Mikey? They liked it. This Ina Garten recipe for Individual Meat Loaves for this week’s Barefoot Bloggers turned out to be surprisingly delicious.

Here’s what I think made the difference: First, you begin with sauteed onions, cooked until soft so they melt into the meat instead of staying crunchy. Secondly, chicken broth is mixed in along with the other ingredients which keeps it from being too dry, like meatloaf sometimes tends to be.

Want to hear your husband say “this is the best meatloaf I’ve ever had”? Click here to get the recipe a give it a go.

meatballs and spaghetti

When I was a new bride, I already had a few dishes in my cooking repertoire, but I wanted to learn to make some of my husband’s favorite dishes, too. So I asked his mother to teach me to make these recipes, and one of them was spaghetti.

Here’s what she puts in: onion, ground beef, tomato sauce (sounds pretty ordinary so far, right?), ketchup, tomato soup, thyme, Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce, and 1/3 cup of sugar. Not that it tastes bad or anything, I mean I had eaten it a few times before and it tasted fine, but not only is it way different than what I learned to make from my mother, but it’s almost like sacrilege to even call it spaghetti sauce, what with all the crazy things it contains. My brain just can’t seem to accept it as spaghetti sauce.

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