Having recently read Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, I am rethinking my approach to this year's gastronomical adventure. I don't want to fill up on low-fat this, and no-carb that. I would like, as he so elegantly puts it, to: "eat food, not too much, mostly plants." So, some of the things I plan to eat hardly look like diet food. They look a lot more like comfort food. I am following Weight Watchers Online, but mostly for how much to eat, not really for what to eat.
Anyhow, all of this brings me to this recipe that I simply must share with the world. Over the holidays, my step-mom gave my sister Shazam and me a stack of old cookbooks. So, I've been perusing them looking for things I'd like to try out. Well, I was paging through one called Italian Cooking Made Easy and I ran across this meatloaf recipe.
This meatloaf is comforting. It's delicious. It's not anything like the meatloaf I grew up eating. And, it's easy. So, without further ado:
Meat Loaf (Polpettone)
4 slices Bread, trimmed
1/2 c. Sherry wine
1 1/4 lb. Veal, chopped *
3/4 lb Beef, chopped *
2 Eggs
1 Onion, grated
1 clove Garlic, crushed *
1 Tbsp Parsley, minced
Salt and Pepper to taste
2 Tbsp Tomato Sauce
1 cup Tomato Sauce, seasoned
1. Soften the bread in wine.
2. Mix bread and everything else except for the 1 c. of tomato sauce in a big bowl. Blend well.
3. Grease a loaf pan (I used non-stick spray) and sprinkle it with bread crumbs.
4. Turn in the meat mixture.
5. Bake at 350 for about an hour and a half.
* The original recipe also called for ground pork, but I just couldn't find any. Blame the giant blizzard that hit Brooklyn last week. So I upped the amount of veal and beef. Also, they called for 1/2 a clove of garlic, but I just couldn't waste the other half of the clove! And I served it with oven fries, green beans and salad. They suggested spaghetti, but I'm just not that Italian.
