Wednesday, November 02, 2016

Recipe time: Meatloaf, briaciole style

I've been cooking a bit more lately; mainly because, the other day, I got some items out of the freezer with the thought, "I've seen that stuff in the freezer long enough!" So, that meant getting out a chuck roast, and some ground beef, that was down at the bottom.

So, I figured I'd make meatloaf; but I wanted to avoid using bread or oats. So I went a-googling, and found this recipe, and decided to try it. Of course, I modified it: I used carrots and celery, rather than green peppers, because I had those on hand; and because I was in a hurry, I wasn't so careful about measurements.

Anyway, let's see how it turned out!

First I opened up some tomato paste and crushed tomatoes (no tomato sauce on hand), using my new can opener. It worked great, as you can see:



These went into the pan together, and I simmered them a little bit. The recipe didn't call for it, but I thought it would help the ingredients mix together better. Oh, and I didn't add any fake sugar, I didn't see any need for that. (Please ignore the spots on the stove top.)


Next, I put all the other ingredients together. I had some chopped garlic in a tube, so I used that, and I think all the other ingredients matched what the recipe called for. I tried mashing this with the spoon, but I knew that wouldn't work. So, I washed my hands and had it all mixed pretty quickly.


Next was to spread all this out on wax paper, thusly:


Over this went slices of ham and provolone. The recipe suggested prosciutto, which is hard to find around here. Instead, I got what passes for Virginia ham hereabouts (hint: the real stuff is so salty you have to soak it); when I laid out the slices, I realized I might have asked them to slice it thinner.


Now the hard part: rolling all that up, and then safely transferring it to the pan. It worked:


Over this I slathered some of the sauce I made:


And that went into the oven, just before heading over to church for the evening Mass for All Saints. Because I knew I'd be back later than the time called for, I turned down the oven to 275 degrees. When I got back, I checked it, and it looked like this:


With cheese oozing out, I felt confident the insides were properly cooked, so I took it out, and drained off some of the fat. I let it cool a bit while I ran upstairs to catch a shower. After something cold to drink (it was unseasonably warm in Russia yesterday and today), I had a slice of this with some leftover red wine from the night before. Then I had another slice!

Verdict: Prosciutto would have been awesome, but this was very good. I'll be interested to see how it works when re-heated, however. I'm not sure just how "low carb" it is, with all that tomato sauce, but the flavors were very good. And it wasn't hard to make; it took about 30 minutes to prep, not bad!

I'm calling this meatloaf "briaciole style," because that's what it is; when I looked up how to spell "briaciole," I found other examples of this. Something to try another time!

3 comments:

rcg said...

You had me at "braciole". The best part is that it makes leftovers for several days that actually get better as time goes by.

Anonymous said...

The tomato sauce provides you a lot of healthy lycopene!

Jenny said...

Lookin good!