Meatloaf and Twice Baked Potatoes

Filed Under Cooking/Baking | 4 Comments

I have been trying to cook a lot more lately. (I got motivated by my friend Jen and her Tasty Tuesdays). I have always been the type of person to consider dumping bags and boxes onto plates, to be cooking. I never made anything that wasn’t from a mix or half made already. Like the crock pot dinners, and boxed dinners where you add chicken… I know, it’s sad. Other than that we ate a lot of grilled chicken and baked chicken. I decided it was my goal to learn how/start actually cooking better meals for my family.

I am in love with the website www.allrecipes.com. You can search for a recipe by keywords, category, cooking style, ethnicity, etc. Then once you find one that you like, you can add it to your online recipe box. You can create a shopping list by clicking meals from your recipe box. It automatically puts them into your shopping list with the right amounts of each ingredient. Part of my issue with cooking is finding good recipes and then shopping for all those dang ingredients, so this cuts out that problem. Also, you can choose to find recipes with photos, so that you can see what you’re supposed to be making. I prefer those.

All this is leading up to me telling you about the dinner I made tonight. I did two things for the first time- meatloaf and twice baked potatoes. I know, meatloaf, ew. It was so random and while I don’t think I would make it again for a while, it was edible and tasted okay. I just hadn’t had it in years and was curious.

Here is the meatloaf recipe:

* 1 1/2 pounds ground beef (Use a lean ground beef or your meatloaf will be greasy/soggy)
* 1 egg
* 1 onion, chopped
* 1 cup milk
* 1 cup dried bread crumbs (I used Contadina Three Cheese Bread Crumbs)
* salt and pepper to taste
* 2 tablespoons brown sugar (I just eyeballed the amount because I didn’t feel like looking for the measuring spoon, it was fine)
* 2 tablespoons prepared mustard (eyeballed this one too)
* 1/3 cup ketchup

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2. In a large bowl, combine the beef, egg, onion, milk and bread OR cracker crumbs. Season with salt and pepper to taste and place in a lightly greased 5×9 inch loaf pan, OR form into a loaf and place in a lightly greased 9×13 inch baking dish.
3. In a separate small bowl, combine the brown sugar, mustard and ketchup. Mix well and pour over the meatloaf.
4. Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) for 1 hour.

The second new thing I made was the twice baked potatoes. This, I will definitely do again. It took about five minutes longer to prepare than regular baked potatoes, but tasted so much better!

For this one I kind of looked at a recipe and modified it. The whole issue is that I don’t like to measure. Any recipe that I can just throw in a little of this and a little of that, it’s a keeper. So here’s what I did:

-Bake two whole potatoes at 350 for about 45 minutes
-Take them out of the oven (I used toaster oven since meatloaf was in big oven) and be careful not to burn your hands when cutting them! Cut the top 1/3 off each potato and then scoop them out, leaving about 1/4 inch of potato inside the peel. They’ll look like you are going to make potato skins.

-Put the scooped out potato (and also scoop out the top 1/3 to use) and mash it up in a bowl. Add enough milk to make it mashy, butter, and I also chose to add Greek seasoning and cheddar cheese.
-Scoop it back onto the bottom of the potatoes as pictured, and then put back in the oven for another 15 minutes. You can use some type of cake decorator/squirter to make it pretty, but I was in a hurry at this point.

Here is our dinner! It’s not the most exciting looking thing ever, but it tasted decent and our bellies got full.

Comments