Special Sunday: Meatloaf Footballs

Welcome to my annual recipe crush. Each February I choose a theme, and provide one or two recipes each day for the whole month. This year the theme is Weekly Menu Planning. What are the categories, you ask? We have Sunday Special, Meatless Monday, Taco Tuesday, Worldly Wednesday, Thrifty Thursday, Fishy Friday, and Celebrate Saturday.

Meatloaf was a standard Sunday dinner while growing up, and I continued that with my own family. But this ain’t my mother’s meatloaf!

Meatloaf satisfies the meat-and-potato folks. It’s comfort food. Bedrock American food. We all had a version of it, and ever diner in the country sells it. We had no idea how Mom made one pound of meat stretch to serve six. Turns out, her stale bread crumbs (or oatmeal) weren’t just to make the meat go further. What she didn’t know was that the bread crumbs were necessary in food chemistry.

Without the binder of egg and carbohydrate, the meatloaf can be too dry and dense. Through the magic of food chemistry, with crumbs and egg, meatloaf holds its shape better because they bring together the different proteins.

There must be a hundred ways to make meatloaf. I wanted to try something I hadn’t made before, so I came up with this variation. Read Dear Husband’s Rating below to see if you want to try this one instead of your own recipe.

On another note, I made this recipe into what I called “footballs” when we camped. We’d have our meatloaf cooked in foil packets over the fire with carrots, potatoes, and onion. A regular meatloaf size just isn’t practical over a campfire. At home, too, for a quicker dinner, cooking these in smaller loaves (footballs), gets your family fed faster.

Footballs (make 8 mini-meatloaves) 

1 pound lean ground beef

½ pound ground pork

½ medium onion, diced

3 cloves of garlic, diced

1 egg

¾ cup Panko crumbs

¼ cup barbecue sauce

½ cup salsa

salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix together the beef and pork thoroughly. Add onion, garlic, egg, and Panko.

When well-blended, add in barbecue sauce and salsa. Thoroughly combine.

Turn meat mixture onto a cutting board and shape into a square. Cut the square into 8 equal pieces.

Form each piece into a football and place in a baking dish sprayed with non-stick cooking spray.  

Bake for about 30-45 minutes depending on how your oven heats.

DH’s Rating: 3 ½ tongues Up

DH: “This is different. ”  Me (excitedly):“Yes, how do you like it?”   DH: “It’s sweeter than usual.”   Me: “That’s the barbecue sauce.”  DH: “Oh.”  Me: “It’s not that sweet. It’s only a little bit of barbecue sauce.”  DH remains quiet for a time. “I like your other meatloaf better.” Okay, then! I liked it a lot, just for the record.