Tangy Meatloaf Burgers

I love meatloaf.

I don't know if I'm supposed to though.  While it is a quintessential American comfort food, it's also equated with mystery meat and gauche cuisine.  But I think when it's done right, it's moist, tasty, and filling.  What's not to love?

My son loves meatloaf as well, not surprising, as it's, well, meat.  I do need to be careful about how creative and sneaky I get when it comes to ingredients, of course.  That boy can spot "relatively healthy" from ten miles away.  So when I saw this recipe in Food Network Magazine, I was psyched.  It can be made with meatloaf mix or with ground turkey.  Since we're a pretty pork-free home, we went the turkey route.  And they suggested a bunch of toppings but I didn't bother.  Not that they didn't sound great, but why waste the effort when the Little Critic would just toss them to the wayside?  But meatloaf with a yummy sauce between bread?  I'm in.

Tangy Meatloaf Burgers

1 small onion (1/2 sliced into rings, 1/2 diced)
1 pound meatloaf mix (ground pork, beef and veal) or ground turkey
1/4 cup fresh parsley, chopped
1/2 cup breadcrumbs (preferably panko)
1 large egg
1 tsp sweet or smoked paprika
1/3 cup ketchup
1/3 cup duck sauce (substitute 1/3 cup orange marmalade or peach preserves mixed with a splash of water if duck sauce is unavailable)
salt and pepper
4 rolls

1.  Preheat a grill to medium high.  Soak the onions rings in a bowl of cold water to keep them crisp.  Meanwhile, combine the meatloaf mix with the diced onion, parsley, breadcrumbs, egg, paprika, 1 tbsp each of ketchup and duck sauce, 1 tsp salt and 1/2 tsp pepper.  Gently form into four 1-inch-thick patties; make an indentation in the middle of each.

2.  Brush the patties with olive oil and grill until marked on the bottom, about 6 minutes.  Meanwhile, mix the remaining ketchup and duck sauce in a small bowl for brushing; set aside.  Turn the patties, brush with the ketchup mixture and continue grilling until cooked through, about 5 more minutes. 

3.  Spread buns with remaining ketchup mixture.  Drain onion rings.  Serve patties on buns with onions.

The Verdict:  Hello, my name is Chef Blunderbutt and I'm just going to toss random crap into ground meat, type it up as a recipe, and have a magazine print it, mmmkay?

It wasn't gross, but it was...busy.  You've got very herbal fresh parsley, the smoky taste of paprika (if you went the smoked paprika route), and because I wasn't buying a jar of duck sauce only to use a quarter of it, orange marmalade.  It's a bit of an arbitrary mix that just doesn't quite marry in the end. 

My poor son sat down at the table and announced, "I'm excited!" for dinner, thinking when I said burgers I meant those beef things between bread that don't taste like a helter-skelter sandwich.  But to be honest, his vanishing passion had less to do with taste and all about finding greens in his meat.  I was able to photograph the downward spiral of the meal:

And so goes dinner with this child.

Sorry so blurry, but here's Amir digging into his burger

 

He now discovers the offending green

Now the burger must be dissected to remove any and all parsley

The two things that I did learn from this recipe were the two tricks they included. The first is putting onion slices in cold water. I couldn't believe how nice and crisp they were in the burger. The other was making the indentation in the center of the burgers before cooking. You know how burgers swell up and look like meatballs instead of patties sometimes?  Making this well keeps them flat.

So I'm not sure if it was just my taste buds, but this meal didn't do it for me.  Let me know if you try it out and get a different result.  Maybe marmalade/paprika/parsley really is a great idea.









Turkey-Vegetable Loaf

Twenty million years ago or so, I bought a cookbook called The Low-Fat Epicure by Sallie Twentyman.  It has quite a few good recipes in it, but I'd never tried this one for Turkey-Vegetable Loaf.  I was kind of excited; I had visions of filling a meatloaf with lots of healthy additions and my family being none the wiser.  Well...

Turkey-Vegetable Loaf

1.25 lb ground turkey
1 small onion, grated and squeezed of excess juice
1 cup fresh spinach or grated zucchini, well packed and squeezed of excess juice
1 large tomato, chopped
1/4 cup minced celery
1 cloves garlic, pressed
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1/4 tsp ground black pepper
4 slices fresh bread ground into crumbs (about 2 cups)
2 egg whites
1/2 cup ketchup

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Combine all ingredients except ketchup, and mix well.  Press into 9 1/2-by-5 1/2-inch loaf pan and spread ketchup over top.  Bake 1 hour, or until turkey loaf is no longer pink in middle. 

2.  Remove from oven, drain off juices, and let sit 5-10 minutes before serving.

The Verdict:  Surprise!  Or not so much--the toddler could spot green flakes from 10 miles away.

In addition to my son going on a vegetable safari (picking out anything he thought might possibly be a vegetable), I found it to be kind of bland.  And plain ketchup spread over the the top?  Just plain yuck.  You could at least mix in a little Worcestershire and brown sugar to create a somewhat tasty glaze.  Instead, it was gelatinous ketchup.

I was happy that the loaf stayed in a loaf shape.  My meatloaves are notorious for crumbling into heaps, so that was one win.  However, I think I'll take what I learned and apply it to a meatloaf that, um, tastes good.

Laura's Shepard's Pie

I met my dear friend Laura when we worked together in Fitchburg, MA. It was a crazy job that could be crazy with stress but we worked with a great crew who knew how to blow off steam. One way of doing that was to have the occasional pot luck lunch. Laura would sometimes make her version of shepard's pie, which is a slight variation on the original with an awesome Latin flair. Laura was born in Uruguay, but I'm not sure if this is the "Uruguayan" way of making it, or if it's just what Laura does. Regardless, it's some good stuff.

Laura's Shepard's Pie

4-6 servings instant mashed potatoes
1/2 cup sour cream
6 oz. shredded cheddar cheese
1 tbsp olive oil
1 lb ground turkey
2 carrots, diced
2 tbsp sofrito
1 tbsp Adobo con pimienta
1/2 medium onion, diced
2 tbsp tomato paste
1/4 cup green olives with pimentos, chopped
4 hard boiled eggs, chopped
1 can (14.5 oz) cream style corn

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Prepare potatoes as directed. Add salt, pepper, sour cream and 3/4 of the cheese. Set aside. Meanwhile, cook turkey with a little olive oil (about a tbsp) over medium heat. Season with the adobo, tomato paste and sofrito while cooking. Once cooked through, set aside. Discard all but about 2 tbsp of the drippings; add carrots and onions. Add meat back to the pan and stir together, along with the green olives.

2. Spread meat mixture in a 13 x 9 x 2" dish. Top with chopped egg. Pour can of cream style corn on top of meat and eggs. Add dollops of potatoes on top of the eggs then carefully spread to cover the casserole. Sprinkle with remaining cheese and place in oven for 15 minutes, then broil to brown the top for 3-4 minutes.

The Verdict: This is a fun spin on a traditional favorite. I especially love the olives.

I found that my meat was not as spicy as Laura's. I remember Laura's having more of a taco meat kind of taste. In that case, you might want to add a few teaspoons of cumin and chili powder to your meat while it's cooking. It might just be that my adobo is helplessly old. Have fun playing around to take the flavor where you want it to go.

You can add the eggs if you desire. I think that they're great for they "hey, look at that!" factor but not so much for the taste. There's lots going on in this dish and eggs are rather mild. The taste gets a bit lost. You can also mix the eggs into the meat rather than use them as an additional layer. But Laura uses them and they make me think of Laura, so the eggs stay in mine.

Thanks for sharing this recipe with me, Laura! It's wonderful, just like you!

Turkey Sloppy Joes

When looking for recipes for this week, I came across this one for Sloppy Joes that originally appeared in Country Living. For some reason, Sloppy Joes struck me as a nice casual meal for a cold winter's night. I decided to use ground turkey, but you can always substitute with ground beef or even soy crumbles.

Sloppy Joes

1 lbs ground turkey

1/2 medium yellow onion, finely chopped

3 large cloves garlic, finely chopped

1/2 can (6-oz) tomato paste

2 tbsp chili powder

1 tsp dry mustard

1/2 tsp paprika

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp ground ginger

3/4 can (14.5 oz) low-sodium chicken stock

1/3 cup ketchup

1/4 Worcestershire sauce

4 whole wheat hamburger buns

1. Brown the meat in a large skillet over medium high heat. Remove the meat and set aside, then drain all but 1 tbsp of the fat.

2. Add the onion and garlic, reduce heat to medium-low, and cook until the onion is soft, about 6 minutes. Add the tomato paste and cook, stirring constantly, for 2 more minutes. Stir in the chili powder, mustard, paprika, salt and ginger and cook for 1 minute more. Increase heat to medium-high and bring to a boil.

3. Reduce heat to medium-low, cover, and let simmer for 20 minutes. Serve on whole-wheat hamburger buns.

The Verdict: While delicious, it seemed like an awful lot of work for what amounts to be a sandwich.

The taste is infinitely better than the Sloppy Joe you can make from a can, or remembering back to my school days, what they serve you in an American high school cafeteria. The mix of spices is great in this recipe, with a hint of sweetness. The original recipe actually called for 2 pounds of meat, but not wanting to have Sloppy Joe leftovers all week, I halved it. I'm not sure if it was the halving or if the recipe was wrong, however, left as it was the meat would have been very dry with very little spice taste. If you're looking for yours to be, well, less sloppy, use only a half can of stock.

As I mentioned above, the time it took me to make this was a little too long for something this casual. I suppose if it were my family's favorite, I wouldn't mind spending the time. So be in the mood to eat this, otherwise, you're spending a good 30 to 45-minutes over the stove for a mediocre meal.

I served our sandwiches with pre-packaged sweet potato fries and homemade pickles. I was going to include the pickle recipe, but decided against it as we found them too strong. I usually use Japanese rice wine vinegar when pickling my own cucumbers; this time I used cider vinegar. One too vinegar-y bite nearly choked my husband, so I'll leave this recipe out to protect your health. A good pickle, i.e. one that won't knock you on the floor with it's potency, would be a good accompaniment to this dish.