Meathead

So a friend of mine from school, also studying abroad in Europe, requested that I write something about easy comfort food. If there's one thing I can call easy comfort food (besides pudding), it's meatloaf. Despite the wholly unappealing name, it is classic Americana, so easy to make, and cheap as hell too.

Meatloaf is really freaking hard to photograph in an attractive manner.

This post is entitled meathead for two reasons:

1. Meatloaf is the subject

2. I went to the gym at the University for the first time today

I'm just going to go ahead and let item number 2 speak for itself but on a very short tangent let me say this to boys:

Having a 25 inch waist and pectoral muscles substantially bigger than Kate Upton's boobs does not make you attractive. It makes you laughable. It's cool to want to be in shape, but looking like a World's Strongest Man reject will not get you any. It's fine to be skinny, it's fine to be built. It's fine to be triangular. It's fine to be oblong or spherical or whatever shape you want so long as you eat healthy and avoid HGH. A body is a gift from God but a misused body is a gift to no one. Also don't hit on girls at the gym because seriously fuck you.

Okay end of rant.

Anyway, this meatloaf took a really freaking long time to cook in my oven for whatever reason, and because I don't have a loaf pan (yet) it didn't have that yummy crust that meatloaf usually gets but it still tasted damn good. So there's that. If you don't have a loaf pan like me, you can just wrap the meatloaf in heavy foil smeared with a little bit of olive oil.

This meatloaf really was making me lose it. I double-checked a few different recipes on allrecipes.com and THEY ALL HAD DIFFERENT COOKING TIMES. By serious lengths of time. Like 45 minutes. So we put the meatloaf in the oven expecting it to be done in under an hour and it JUST WASN'T. So frustrating. We ate dinner at a seriously Spanish hour, about 9:30 and by that time I was practically catatonic with rage and desire to eat my freakin' meatloaf.

When it was finally ready and all dunked in ketchup from (not stealthily) stolen ketchup packets, I was about ready to cry it was so tasty.

Tommy summed things up nicely with this choice quote from one of his favorite movies:

"Oh yeah, and one more thing: it's been emotional."

Ingredients:

1-2 lbs. ground beef

1 small onion, finely chopped

3/4 c. bread crumbs

1 tsp. herbes fines, Italian herbs or herbes du Provence

Dash of Worcestershire sauce

1/4 c. BBQ sauce

1 egg, beaten

Brown sugar to taste

1. In a large bowl, combine all of the ingredients and mix well using your hands.

2. Form into a large loaf (if using 2 lbs. of ground beef form 2 medium-sized loaves)

and place in the middle of the lightly greased loaf pan or olive oil.

3. Smear the top with BBQ sauce and sprinkle with brown sugar to taste.

4. Bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for about 60-90 minutes. Meatloaf is not an exact science. The meatloaf should only be just slightly pink in the center.