Meatloaf

Comfort food doesn't get any better than this. Just make use of some of your Survival Cooking inventory and there you have it. Prep time no more than 15 minutes. Cook it for an hour. Take your time eating it. Left overs are great sandwich material. Here's how it happens:

INGREDIENTS:
1¼ to 1½ lb. lean chopped beef
2 eggs
½ small onion diced fine (or 1½ tbsp. dried minced onion)
¼ cup diced green pepper
2 or 3 slices of lousy bread lightly toasted (like Wonderbread - really, I'll explain later)
Spices & Flavoring (here's where it gets a little tricky):
3 tbsp. Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce (I'm fussy about the brand here)
½ tsp. Coarse Black Pepper
¼ tsp. Garlic Salt
¼ tsp. Dry Mustard Powder (this is a must)
½ - 1 tsp. Tabasco (or other similar) Sauce (I like it with a little fire)
A little less than ¼ tsp of Oregano
A couple of squirts of Ketchup (not Heinz, we don't like her) or Barbeque Sauce
Parsley Flakes for effect only (they add nothing but looks)

Now we're ready for the mixing. The order here is important so pay attention.

Fire up the oven to 350°. If you're using the dried onions, put them in a small glass and add about 2 Tbsp. of water. Let that sit just like that. The onion bits will absorb the water and expand to their normal proportions. This is easier than dicing an onion and just as good, so purists be damned. Take the lousy bread and put it in the toaster to dry it out even more than it is already, but don't burn it. The object here is to get the bread pieces to be able to soak up as much of the flavors as possible. Bread like Wonderbread is mostly air anyway so it even looks like a sponge, which is just what we want here. So while that's going on, beat the two eggs in a mixing bowl, and add the Worcestershire Sauce. Mix thouroughly. Okay, now the bread is toast (two slices anyway) so we can cut that up into about ¼ inch squares. It's easy when it's toast. You may need a third slice so pop it into the toaster now. If it turns out you don't need it, throw it out for the birds. Get over it. It's only Wonderbread! Let the cut up bread sit to get cooled off a bit. Add the spices to the mix now, but not the onions. Stir it up a goodly amount. Here's the judgement part. Add the bread cubes a little at a time until all the liquid is absorbed into the bread. If you find you've added too much bread, and the mix is pretty dry looking, well then you've got to add more liquid. I'm usually drinking a beer during all this so that's frequently come in pretty handy. Just a little though. You're trying to get the bread mix to look a little like the consistancy of the ground beef. It may be that there's a lot of liquid that hasn't been absorbed. This is when that third piece of bread comes into play. Add it a little at a time until there's little or no liquid left. It takes a while for the bread to absorb it all, so don't be impatient. During this phase, you'll probably see birds gathering at your kitchen window, hoping that you don't need the entire third slice. Ignore them. They're flighty things anyway. Now that you've got the perfect mix with your bread and other stuff, add the onions and the peppers. If there's a lot of water left over in the onion glass, pour it off. By this time it should have been absorbed. Mix it all up as good as you can. No meat so far. Smells pretty good all by itself doesn't it? Add the meat at this point. This is the part where you have to break off pieces of the chopped meat and mix it up with your hands with the bread mix. Mix it as thouroughly as you can. It's important. Form it into a kind of loaf like shape and transfer it into a Pyrex bread pan like the one in the picture above. I'm not sure what you call it. Make a groove in the top of the loaf and add the ketchup or barbeque sauce there. Hopefully the oven is ready by now, so pop it in.

All this takes about 15 minutes. The cooking time is 1 hour, which is, coincidentally, the time needed for a baked potato or sweet potato. How handy. Throw a vegetable in a pan and put it on a burner. Start cooking it when you need to. At this point you've got an entire meal going. And in only about 15 minutes. Not bad. It's Survival Cooking.

The Pyrex pan. I like it because it cleans easily, and it becomes the container for the left overs.

Gimme feedback!!

MEATLOAF