Meatloaf, yes, meatloaf. OMG

Dinner last night started out with 1.72 lbs of ground beef, pork, and veal, and a vague notion of meatloaf. I looked up a recipe from Gourmet on epicurious and adapted it to the ingredients at hand. It was good enough to share.

1 cup bread crumbs
1/3 cup 2% milk
1/2 large onion, finely chopped
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 celery rib, finely chopped
3 long thin carrots, finely chopped
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
1 3/4 lb combined ground beef, pork, and veal (grocery stores often package them this way)
2 eggs
1/3 cup dried parsley (I didn't have fresh)

We were out of bread crumbs, so I took a heel of rosemary-olive loaf and ground it up. The food processor wasn't up to the task - dried bread is too tough. The blender worked great, though. I'll have to remember that.

The recipe calls for sauteeing the onion, garlic, celery, and carrot (basically mirepoix) in butter and then putting the lid on until the carrots are tender. Meatloaf should not be crunchy. I found that the loaf reached 155 degrees in the middle in much less than an hour, but then, maybe I made a flatter, thinner loaf than they suggest.

I skipped the bacon and prunes; with them, the whole thing would have had some sweetness to balance out the slight saltiness, and it would have been richer. I liked it the way it was - it was tender, perfectly seasoned, and not too oily. Gourmet can sometimes go a little over the top with the fats, but this was a winner.