Every so often I get a little too big for my britches and try to make something basic into something fancy, just to show off. Case in point, last summer I needed to make something to take to a potluck picnic. Everybody loves meatloaf, but few of my generation seem to know how to make it, which is in itself a bit of weirdness that would qualify for its own blog post someday, so I decided I would make a meatloaf. I didn’t want them all to think I was a lame cook, though, so I decided to make a tri-colored spiral meatloaf. I got ground turkey, ground pork, and ground lamb, and I seasoned each differently. The lamb was Greekish, with lemon zest and oregano. The turkey was Middle Eastern, with cumin, garlic, and so on. I can’t remember what the pork one was supposed to be. All of them had salt and pepper, of course. I spread first the pork, then the turkey, then the lamb in a big rectangle, jelly roll style, then rolled then up into a spiral, whacked off hunks the size of my loaf pans, and baked.<\/p>\n
What a lame meatloaf. The color differences were too indistinct for the spiral to be noticeable, unless you were really<\/i> looking for it, and the flavorings sort of blurred together too, so the result was a weird dark-beige-on-light-beige spiral with a horrible muddle of herbs and spices. Only the lamb had a respectable amount of fat in it, so the overall loaf was dry, too. <\/p>\n
(Note to food stylists: if you’re going to put an artichoke on the plate before photographing, use a raw one. Cooked artichokes are delicious but ugly.)<\/p>\n
Next time I made meatloaf, I used the recipe God gave us: fatty hamburger, salt and pepper, a bit of oregano. Since I’m gluten intolerant, I used minced shiitakes instead of milk-moistened breadcrumbs, but I hardly think that qualifies as a massive departure from the sacred meatloaf recipe passed down through generations. I mooshed it all together with my bare hands, globbed it into a loaf pan, baked, and served with ketchup. It was way better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every so often I get a little too big for my britches and try to make something basic into something fancy, just to show off. Case in point, last summer I needed to make something to take to a potluck picnic. Everybody loves meatloaf, but few of my generation seem to know how to make […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/erinvang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/erinvang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/erinvang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erinvang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erinvang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/erinvang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":980,"href":"https:\/\/erinvang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions\/980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/erinvang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erinvang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erinvang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}