Number 98
Greens-stuffed
Meatloaf.
A meatloaf
in my Top 100 Meals? Yes—meatloaf. And, yes, greens-stuffed. First, let’s look
at what we have so far. Number 100 in the Top 100 Meals was leftover Shrimp
& Eggplant Casserole, and number 99 was the Southern-Style (Chicago ) Hot Dog. Yum.
Can a measly meatloaf rise to such heights as to be named Number 98? Well, if
it’s Greens-stuffed Meatloaf, indeed it can.
When you’re feeding a large family,
as I had to do for many years (Our family consisted of two adults and four
kids, aged 5, 10, 14, & 15 when my wife and I married and I was named head
cook—a story unto itself), finding ground-beef-based recipes that are liked and
will be eaten by everyone involved is a necessity. It can also be a chore. As a
rule, everyone loves “The Big-Four Beefy Dinners”—tacos, lasagna, spaghetti,
and California .
(I’ll explain California
later. It’s higher on the list. It’ll also be one of your Big-Four Beefy
Dinners) Those four are obvious winners, loved by one and all, but meatloaf?
Stuffed with greens? It’s difficult enough to get kids to eat greens, no matter
how you fix them, but to “ruin a good meatloaf,” as my kids liked to say, is
“heresy.” Actually, the greens in this dish are almost tasteless. The hard part
is getting kids to try it. That’s why the greens are hidden.
Ingredients:
2 cups frozen greens (turnips, mustard, or spinach—2 -10oz.
pkgs.). Cooked!
1 onion, chopped.
2 cloves garlic, chopped
2-3 tablespoons olive oil
1 ½ lbs. ground chuck
1 ½ lbs. Italian sausage (ground, or removed from casings)
4 slices whole wheat bread, toasted, torn into pieces
1 teaspoon–1 tablespoon Tony Chachere’s Original Creole
Seasoning
2 eggs
1 jar good salsa (I prefer Jardine’s—expensive, but
oh-so-good)
Spray oil. I like canola.
Cook the
greens first. Actually, choose the
greens first. Even I wasn’t brave enough to try turnip or mustard greens on our
kids. I used spinach. It’s milder in taste and well-known. Ask a kid what mustard
greens are, and he’ll most likely shrug his shoulders and pretend you’re from
outer space. My advice is—especially, if this meal involves children—use
spinach. Once the kids have flown the coop—or have been pushed out of the nest,
as must often be done—you can get a little crazy and try the stronger greens.
In fact, I’ve never tried collards. I love collards, but I’m afraid they’re too
strong for this dish. My advice, therefore, is use spinach the first time you
attempt this dish.
My main point is, if you’re trying
to plan ahead, and you’re on a schedule, don’t forget this step. Cook the
greens. Cook ‘em and drain ‘em. Then preheat the oven to 375 degrees. When I
cook, I like to plan the meal so everything comes together just before we plan
to eat, and with kids, if you don’t plan to eat at a certain time every night,
you’ll be sitting at the table with your mate, and that’ll be it—especially, if
the kids find out you’re experimenting with them again. I have a bad habit of
scanning a recipe like this one, and missing the precooking part. For instance,
I’ll say, “Okay—fifteen minutes prep and one hour to cook. Let it sit five.
Giving myself a ten-minute margin of error, I come up with a total of 80-90
minutes.” If I forget the pre-cooking, not only will my “margin of error”
disappear, I’ll most likely be ten to fifteen minutes late with the meal. Maybe
your kids don’t grumble—mine sure did. Hell. They still do.
So . . .
after you’ve precooked the greens,
sauté the onion and garlic in olive oil until soft—about five minutes. Add the cooked greens. Cook three more minutes.
The oil will be taken up by the greens so keep an eye on them and don’t let
them burn.
Wash your
hands. Wash ‘em good. Combine chuck, sausage, toast, Tony C’s, eggs, and salsa
in a bowl. Mix thoroughly. Yes—you must plunge your hands into the gooey mess.
Be brave. Don’t over-mix but be sure all are well combined.
Next comes
what I call the “cater-to-my-wife” part. You see, my wife, Linda, won’t eat
greens. Not now. Not a one. When we had kids in the house, though, she did. I
can’t recall her ever complaining when I prepared greens. She now claims it was
her “solidarity plan.” She was gonna back me, no matter what I fixed. Well,
this isn’t entirely true. Linda was right beside the kids when they mutinied
over my many attempts at fish soup. And calves’ liver. I’m sure there were
more, but they don’t come to mind right now.
Anyway, Linda’s a native
Southerner, born in Montgomery, Alabama, and was raised by a Southern father
who grew greens in his garden, loved to eat greens, and tried to feed greens to
his children. Yet, I have never seen a collard, mustard, or turnip-green pass
my wife’s beautiful lips. She pretty-much bypasses the mustard family. Linda
will eat cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower, but hides when I fix kale,
Brussels sprouts, or kohlrabi. I’ve never seen my wife try horseradish, one of
my favorite condiments. In fact, I’m not sure she likes the condiment, mustard.
She’s a ketchup woman. She’ll eat spinach, but only as a last resort. And
spinach, as any good Southerner knows, is not Southern. Did Popeye have a
Southern accent? Have you ever seen what happens to little spinach plants when
the first hot day in Alabama
in April hits them? They bolt. They bolt like Linda when I fix collard greens.
And, most of all, spinach isn’t in the mustard family—it’s a durned old
goosefoot. That’s right—spinach is in the goosefoot family. Why would anyone
eat goosefoot plants when they could devour mustards?
Therefore, and anyhow, when I make this
dish, now that the children are gone and my wife doesn’t feel she needs to set
a good example for them by showing “solidarity,” I leave all hint of greens out
of her portion of the meatloaf. Even the goosefeet greens. Or is it geesefeet? And back in the days when we
were feeding a horde of children, I used spinach, knowing I’d have a war on my
hands if I tried to make my wife eat real, as-good-for-you-as-they-taste,
Southern greens. Dutifully, my wife ate the meatloaf stuffed with spinach.
Nowadays, when I make the dish, I suit myself—I use mustard or turnip greens,
or whatever I have in the freezer—for my portion, and I make another pan just
for my wife that’s all meat. It gives us fodder for dinnertime conversation.
“Feeling a bit superior, are we?” Linda will say. “A bit,” I answer, chewing my
greens as distinctly as I can. Let’s face it—ground beef takes little chewing.
I prefer the turnip greens with chopped turnips in them—they resemble little
potatoes—and I can hoist them up on my fork, waving them about in the air
before I shove them into my mouth. I know she can see the little “taters.” And,
yes, when I eat my meatloaf with greens in front of my wife, I do act and feel
superior. I must. You see, this is the same woman who can work the Thursday New York Times crossword puzzle in the
same time it takes me to finish the Tuesday one. She’ll hold it up for me to
see. I cheer. I praise her. And I take my own boasts when and how I can.
So . . .
since I must make two different dishes, I divide the meat portions in half.
Using two disposable aluminum pans (8”x 3 ¾”x 2 ½” deep), I spray them both
with canola oil and put half of the meat from my portion in one pan, and all of
the other portion in my wife’s pan. Hers is ready to cook. It is also oh, so
plain, so pedestrian. Oh, well.
In my pan—the portion that will
taste oh-so-much-better—I add the
cooked onion and greens mixture on top of the first layer of meat, then add the
rest of the meat. Back when I was cooking for a crowd, knowing they were going
to eat the spinach, whether they liked it or not, I used a larger pan—an 11 ¾”
by 9 ¼” by 1 ½” deep, or a 9” square pan—for the entire batch. If you are so
lucky, so fortunate, as to be able to make a single meatloaf, rather then two
smaller ones, use the larger, single pan.
In mine, I don’t care whether it
looks like a traditional meatloaf or not, but in the larger version, you
should. In yours, place the greens in the center of the meat, keeping them away
from the sides a tad, and place the second batch of meat on top. Once again,
stick your hands into it, forming a sidewall and seaming the edges together, so
that when you un-pan it, the result looks like it’s an all-meat meatloaf. It’s
much more fun this way. Imagine yourself sitting there, watching an unsuspecting
child who thinks he’s about to dig into an all-meat meatloaf. He slathers it in
ketchup, cuts off a huge bite bigger than his mouth when it’s wide open, and
his fork freezes, an inch from being devoured. Oh, the joy. Oh, the laughs. Oh,
what a liar I can be. I only wish that you, too, will have as much fun as Linda
and I had convincing our children there was nothing else in the house to eat
and all the pizza places were closed for the night. Greens-stuffed Meatloaf is
not a dish for the timid to prepare.
Onward!
Cook for one hour. Have a beer. Have two or three. You deserve it. Plus, you’ll
need the courage beer will give you. The hard part—getting the kids to eat your
creation—is just beginning. Take the pan or pans from the oven and let it or
them sit five minutes. Using gloves or hot pads (I use a wad of paper towels
because my wife gets upset when she has to wash the hot pads, and they’re about
to get greasy), pour off accumulated grease. Please don’t pour it down the
sink. I save glass jars and tops just for this purpose. Then—over the sink—if
you used the small pan, take a wad of paper towels, about four plies thick,
enough to cover your entire palm, and holding the paper towels against the top
of the meatloaf, flip the pan and shake the loaf loose. If you used a large pan
to cook the loaf in, cover a plate with two plies of paper towels and use the
plate, not your palm. Holding the loaf in your palm, minus the pan, put a
serving plate on top (the bottom of the meatloaf) of the loaf, and flip it back
over. If you’ve poured off most of the hot grease, you’ll be okay. If not, and
you burn yourself, consider it a part of cooking. Without battle scars and
wounds, how can we truly say our job is worthwhile? Knife cuts, hot-pan singes,
and stupid hot-grease burns, are the merit badges we proudly wear to show our
dedication to the Crazy Cook’s Club—we who slave away for little praise, living
in the belief that we are preparing good-tasting meals that are inherently
healthy, to boot. We deserve to act superior.
Okay—it’s
time to enjoy the meal. I would place a huge bottle of cheap ketchup on the
table for the kids and the wife. On my end I’d have a smaller bottle of Heinz
Chili Sauce. I didn’t share the good (expensive) stuff with the kids. Still
don’t. The wife? Sure. But only if she asks. They all prefer plain ketchup,
anyway. And now the hard part—getting the “others” to try your creation. I
mean, seriously, when covered with either ketchup or chili sauce, the greens
can’t be tasted. Go ahead, dig in. You can eat while all the others sit and
fume, wondering why you’re so mean to them. If I’ve heard “Can’t we just order
a pizza? We’ll pay for it ourselves,” once, I’ve heard it a hundred times.
This dish
reminds me of a story. In our house, where I was the cook, our kids were told
that they could invite their friends over to eat whenever they wanted, as long
as we had a little advance notice. Kids don’t think these things through. Not
many kids visited us at suppertime more than once. For one thing we had rules. The first and foremost rule was no telephone calls during the meal. Not
even I could rise to answer the phone. I’d turn the ringer down or off, so we
wouldn’t be tempted. Nowadays, with hand-held devices, it’s much harder, but we
still enforce the rule when the kids visit—we’re having dinner, not a gabfest
with strangers. The second rule was that everyone—everyone, even the guests—had to read a newspaper article before we
ate. I’ll go deeper into this one at another time, saying only that this rule
saved Linda and me from strangling our kids through their teenage years.
Well—to continue the story—after three or four of their friends joined us at
various times and sat—with a recently read newspaper article in their heads,
and the prospect of eating an entire meal without even one phone call, and
staring mystified at a mound of greens-stuffed meatloaf, or a pile of braised
Brussels sprouts, or a steaming bowl of hot fish soup—we spent most of our
meals without the presence of strangers at our table. To tell you the truth, not having strange, unruly teenagers
eating with you isn’t so bad—especially when they’re smarmy young boys who are
there only because you have a pretty daughter for them to gawk at. Hey—try
serving up some Greens-stuffed Meatloaf and see if you don’t feel the same way.
Here’s good cookin’
comin’ at ya. Earl.
