Comfort Food Meatloaf Dinner Recipe

Hi! I'm Betty and welcome to Betty’s kitchen. We’re going to be making meatloaf today. Meatloaf is probably one of the most favorite comfort foods around and I'm going to show you some secrets to make your meatloaf perfect.

So let’s start with ground beef and what I have here is lean ground beef. I always emphasize that I like to buy or present fat ground beef. You might prefer the taste of other but I think this is healthier and all in all it works it very well for the meatloaf that I make. So I'm going to use 1 ½ pounds. There is one pound, let’s remove that little piece of plastic and then I have cut this pound into two parts, so I have a half pound to cook with it and we’ll just set this aside because I have half pound there and I probably be making into two, one quarter pound hamburgers.

To this ground beef, I'm going to add salt and the rule is one teaspoon salt per pound of ground beef, so I have measured out in a salt measuring spoon. I have 1 ½ teaspoons of salt, so that’s going to be corresponding to the 1 ½ pounds of ground beef. I'm not going to start mixing it because there's going to be a few additives here. We’re going to add onion and I have just chopped in our kitchen chopper, electric chopper, it’s very easy to do. And I have ½ cup, so that’s going to go in and then the next thing I'm going to add will be ketchup.

One of my secrets is that it’s important to put ketchup inside the meatloaf mix as it is to put it on top and we will be coming back later and putting on the top. But this is really important to the flavor of the meatloaf, so I have ½ cup of ketchup. Now I’ll be adding two well-beaten eggs just mix them with my mixture and I'm ready just to put those in. And then my final ingredient before I start blending this is going to be broth cubes and I just want to remind you of the day that we made Benedictine sandwiches. We did it with Hearty white bread and if you recall, we used biscuit cutter to cut out to circles then we put that nice, green Benedictine spread in between made a beautiful finger sandwich. But we have this leftover.

So I made six of them and it takes two of these of course to make one. And I had six of these leftover, strange looking pieces of bread. I stocked them in a bag; put them in the freezer and now I have a use for it. I would have found some use, crotons or something but if you just take kitchen shears and this would be very easy to finish over here. I had six of them and it turned out to be approximately four cups which you see that I'm ending up with two cups here and two cups there and I'm adding all of that.

This is to give it a lovely texture. If you just use meat without adding something like oatmeal or bread to soften it up then you're not going to be very pleased with your meatloaf. So there you go and here’s another secret of based meatloaf, well not quite there yet. I'm going to blend this up a little bit but the secret was getting ready to tell you about is this has to be mixed with a mixer in my opinion. I'm sure a lot of you cooks out there don’t use a mixer. You just probably go in right now with your hands and do it. And I used to do that but then while I’m started doing it with mixer, the texture is so much better that I always do it. This will going to make some noise, so let me mix on it well and then I’ll be back.

So, I finished the mixing the meatloaf and you can see that it has a really nice texture, and all those bread cubes are incorporated into the mixture. It is work with it with your hands and tries not to punch a hole in it because it will be very easy to do. So you get it until I stop to the top, on the sides.

Now, I think I’m going to have to dig in here and I put this in, so just use your hand make this into s loaf. So it should shape very easily into a nice loaf, round it up and put it in here. Stretch it out a little bit, so you don’t have to do that after it’s in here. And then the next thing I want to do before I get this to all corners is wash my hands, so I can get that ketchup and put it up with my ketchup. This is fairly fresh bottle I’m going to use that to there.

There is no particular measurement that I'm going to give you here, if you like ketchup a lot. Let me shake that up a bit. If you like it a lot then use a lot but my advice is to cover it thoroughly and if you have to take your fingers or spoon, back of the spoon and spread that out that’s fine. But be sure it’s covered thoroughly that’s part of the nice expectation of a good meatloaf. So I can't tell you exactly how much I put on here but you can see it and I will try to approximate it in the recipe when I write it up for you, so there we go.

This is going to go into a pre-heated 350-degree oven one hour and 15 minutes. Cover it with this foil. At that point, I will leave the foil back out, so the top is exposed and cook it 15 minutes longer, so it will have a chance to bubble up and brown a little bit on the top. So in the oven make sure you have moved your racks apart so there’s room for a loaf and put it, put the center of the oven the best you can.

Our meatloaf is done. I’ve had it took me in the oven at 350 degrees for one hour and 15 minutes with the foil over the top and then for 15 minutes with the foil opened out. So I’m going to remove it and put on a protected counter. Turn the oven off and then we’ll try to pick this out. Let’s go over here and I’ll show you one more secret that I have with regards to my meatloaf. And that is that it really should be sliced with an electric knife for the prettiest look, so this going to be a long noisy but let me slice a few slices.

And I’m going to stop right there and isn't that lovely, so I'm going to serve it onto a serving plate. Let’s take a couple of slices maybe up from the center. It’s a nice slice of meatloaf and another one to go with it, with that nice ketchupy top, so that’s going to be very nice.

Now I'm going to go to the salad that I worked on today to show you how it will go with our meal of the day. We have our green pea which drizzly dressing salad and its all ready except for one thing that I mentioned earlier. And that is, remember when we made our baked bacon and froze it, I just add up three pieces. And topped in the microwave, they are still warm that’s when you want to put them on and serve immediately. So you just crumble this up over the top and you can put more or less than three pieces but that works nicely for me. And those are you could see they’re very crisp and crunchy, you will always have them available if you do them about that method. So go to Betty’s Baked Bacon and scrambled eggs if you want to find that method.

Now let me serve some of that into a dish and I think I’ll just take the spoon here, and we’ll go down through a target some of today’s dinner. I will probably add a yeast roll and maybe some corn on a cub, probably a casserole of mashed potatoes that have cream cheese, the sour cream and a nice glass of iced tea.