Now that I’m eating red meat again and have rediscovered the deliciousness that is a hamburger, I’m bringing home ground beef. It is one of the cheapest meats I can buy around here and I cut it with ground pork, which is so cheap they are practically giving it away. One of the things I’ve wanted to try to make is meatloaf. It was simply not something we had growing up, so I’d never made it.

On my break this afternoon, I Googled meatloaf recipes to see what’s in them. It turned out that the common ingredients were ground meat, seasoning, bread crumbs, egg, and ketchup as a topping/sauce, and that the baking time for about a pound of meat was 45 minutes to an hour.

Seasoning is to taste, bread crumbs are a filler, egg is a binder, and ketchup is sweet and slightly tangy sauce. Okay, I could work with that and what I had in my pantry.

Come dinner prep time, I dumped the following into a big bowl:

-about a pound total of ground pork and ground beef

-an amount that looked right of garlic powder and onion soup mix

-a small handful of quick cooking oats for my filler

-ground chia seeds for my binder

-a little water to make up for the lack of moisture from an egg

-BBQ sauce for the topping

I mixed everything but the BBQ sauce well, adding a little more water until the consistency looked ‘right’.

I then put it into my silicon loaf pan, smoothed out the top, and set a time for 4o minutes since my oven runs hot.

At the 30ish minute mark, I did a quick check and the juices were still pink. At the 40ish minute mark, the juices were brown, so I checked the internal temperature and the loaf was just about done. I spread BBQ sauce over the top and returned the loaf to the oven for another 10 minutes.

End result? A perfectly seasoned, perfectly loaf shaped (and not crumbly — it holds its shape!), meatloaf good enough for company.

There is something about cooking that makes me feel like a magician. I very, very rarely have complete fails and utter successes like these are most often the norm.

But you can see why I rarely share ‘recipes’ — I don’t use them. I’ve been cooking for so long that I can eyeball measurements. I know how certain foods look at a point in their cooking time, so I very rarely overcook or burn anything and I can get the meat and the perfectly cooked veggies to the table at the same time.

I’m completely self-taught from watching my parents in the kitchen and just doing a heck of a lot of it professionally when I worked in a group home as a teenager. I think that for this winter, it might be fun to find a cooking class in Maz!