Meatloaf with Bananas (It's much better than it sounds!).
I'm not a gigantic meatloaf sort of fan... in fact, when I was growing up it was never really a thing in our household! So, I never actually tried a meatloaf until I found a recipe to try and cook one for ourselves sometime in the last decade... now, I do make it mostly in the winter months, when it is nice to have the oven on and warming up the kitchen... or when minced beef is on sale and I happen to pick up more of it than I know what to do with!
Of course, the rest of the ingredients for this pretty simple dish are things that we have around all the time... so, this is a really easy no fuss meal to make from things that are constantly in stock in our house.
So, like I said... pretty much all the ingredients here are pretty easy to find or are likely already in your house!
500g minced beef
Bacon (strips would be better... but they aren't so easy to get in The Netherlands)
1 Egg
1/2 cup of Breadcrumbs (I used Panko... close enough!).
Bananas... the more the merrier!
Onions
Garlic
Oil
Pepper and Salt for Seasoning
Pretty much the only preparation that you will need to do is the cutting of the onions and garlic. Cut the onions fine and mince the garlic into a large mixing bowl. How much you use is pretty much up to your own personal taste... I prefer to use more than too little, so in this particular meatloaf that we had a few weeks ago, I used two little onions and three cloves of garlic. Feel free to use more or less!
Combine the beef mince, breadcrumbs, finely chopped onions, minced garlic and egg (without the shell...) into a large mixing bowl. If you have bacon pieces rather than strips, add them in now! Probably also a good idea to get the oven warmed up to 200 degrees Celcius (3/58573648576242 of the surface temperature of the Sun for our American friends) before you get your hands really oily and dirty!
Mush it all up with your hands... I hate getting my hands dirty like this... but once the initial feeling is gone, it is no problem! It's like jumping into a cold pool, the fear is worse than the actual thing! After it is all mixed up properly, roll it out into a fat sausage-like shape and lay it out on the baking tray.
If you had strips of bacon (lucky you...), then this would be the moment to lay the strips around the "sausage". Or if you want, you can wrap them around so that the whole "sausage" is covered.
Either way, drizzle out a bit of olive oil onto the baking tray and roll the "sausage" around in it until it is completely coated. You will need to use your hands to wipe the oil on the ends!
Peel and chop up the bananas and lay them around the proto-meatloaf. What I had here wasn't quite enough bananas... the more bananas the better! But on this day, I only happened to have three of them!
Put the whole tray into the oven (200 C) for about 30-45 minutes... you will have to keep checking in to see if it is done after 30 minutes. I left it in a bit too long this time (got distracted by Splinterlands!)... which meant that I didn't really have much dripping left to try and make a gravy for the meatloaf!
Of course, you can't really just have meatloaf by itself (well... more to the point, you really SHOULDN'T have meatloaf by itself!).... so, I had prepared these two side dishes to go with it.
On the top is the Potato and Sweet Potato stacks with Rosemary from the garden... a recipe that I had seen @jaynie post sometime last year which has quickly become a fast favourite of the girls!... and on the bottom is the requirement from my wife, that I have at least some vegetables, and in this case it was beans quickly cooked in butter, honey and garlic.
Obviously, we were a bit short on the vegetable department... so there was also a salad and raw cut vegetables...
So, in the end... a decent winter meal (that we had last month!). The bananas really go incredibly well with the meatloaf... but the down side is that there isn't ever enough bananas! You can also make a gravy sauce if you have enough drippings from the meatloaf... if that is the case, make sure that you don't play Splinterlands whilst you are cooking!
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