Tuesday, March 07, 2006

The Way of Things

While I was away, for some reason I was eating an awful lot of red meat, so when I went grocery shopping after getting home, I wanted to get something really light for dinner, like chicken or fish. Somehow, by the time I had left the store, the plan had morphed into thinking meatloaf was a good idea. I haven't made meatloaf in a couple of years, probably, but I make quite good meatloaf. But I don't know why I decided to make it right after returning exhausted from almost a week-long trip away. But I did make it. It came out of the oven looking lovely-- my secret for meatloaf is that you don't mush it down into a pan, you just round it in your hands and sit it in a baking dish, so it kind of looks like a little football, or really, almost exactly like a human brain, if a human brain was sort of pinkish, or, I guess, if a human brain was made of cooked ground beef. (When I post the recipe in my blogger cookbook, I'll have to call it "Madame X's Meat-Brain" because it sounds so appetizing that way.)
Anyway, as soon as I got the meatloaf out of the oven, I realized I had a problem. I had not thought about what to eat with the meat loaf. Really mashed potatoes are the only thing, but I didn't happen to have any. All I had was salad. Salad and meat loaf would not be the greatest combination under the best of circumstances, but it gets worse: I took a bite of the meatloaf and realized that it tasted weird, like really bad weird. It didn't take long to figure out that my breadcrumbs were to blame, as they turned out to be somewhere around 5 years old. If breadcrumbs are made of stale bread anyway, you wouldn't think it would matter if they got more stale, but now I know it does.
All that is my really long way of telling you that I totally wasted about $5 worth of ground beef. And suffered stinging eyes while chopping onions without recompense. And even the salad wasn't that great, as I put too much dressing on it! And it was another day when I forgot to use my new grocery store frequent shopper card! But I had one minor bit of good food karma amidst the bad: the apples I bought wouldn't scan and weigh properly, so the cashier just gave up and charged me a total of 50 cents for them, which was probably less than half price.
So I shall end on that note of minor satisfaction, and now hopefully go to sleep for 12 hours. Nighty night!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I use oatmeal in my meatloaf, instead of breadcrumbs. But, it seems like a nice big blob of ketchup or barbecue sauce would cover up the stale taste!