Monday Night Musings

I sometimes wish my life were just a little more interesting.  It’d certainly make this blog more readable, but I’m not terribly concerned about that.  I think I have two whole comments on here, and I think one was spam, but I allowed it anyway.  It hasn’t continued to spam the blog.  So, here we are with another post that no one but me would find particularly interesting.

Of course, with literally millions of blogs out there, I can’t imagine that there are many that get any real traffic.   There are a few that I read regularly.  Some national, some local.  Of course, if I felt comfortable pontificating on politics and other issues, there’d be a lot more here. 

The weather continues to deteriorate.  We came home tonight and found one of the privacy fence panels between our house and the neighbors had blown down in this persistent nor’easter.  There’s a little tropical system spinning up down down south of Cuba that’s going to affect our weather by the weekend, so I’m not looking for much improvement, or much opportunity to ride my bike, most of the week. 

I made meatloaf for dinner tonight.  A variation on my mothers’ recipe.  It’s a darn good recipe made better by bacon on top.  Since there’s not a lot else to talk about, let’s go there.

1 1/2 lbs ground beef
1/2 lb ground pork.
1/4 cup seasoned bread crumbs
1 egg
2T ketchup of steak sauce (I prefer steak sauce)
2-3 cloves garlic, chopped fine.
1/4 cup onion, chopped fine.
2T chopped basil (optional)
Salt and Pepper to taste.
4 strips raw bacon.

Preheat oven to 350.  In a bowl, combine all ingredients except the bacon.  Mix by hand, and don’t over mix the ingredients.  Shape into a loaf and place on a rack in an open baking dish.  Place bacon strips on top of the loaf, covering the entire loaf.  Bake until the internal temperature of the loaf reaches 155 degrees, about 90 minutes.  Allow to rest and let carryover raise the temp to 160.  Cool slightly before slicing and serving, and hope your wife doesn’t want to put ketchup on it.

So many meatloaf recipes call for baking in a loaf pan drowning in ketchup, but that allows the meatloaf to just stew in it’s own juice.  If you bake it on a rack, it is a lot less greasy when you serve.  And I know, some say ketchup is the American Mother Sauce, but it’s just not my favorite thing.

Anyway, feel free to give it a try, and enjoy.

–scene–