My older son requested meatloaf for his birthday dinner. I have tried to blog about meatloaf before, but never successfully. There are reasons for this.

1. The recipe we love is so basic that I feel kind of sheepish.
2. All my fancy meatloaf experimentation has yielded non-inspirational results.
3. I don’t make meatloaf that often because it’s a lot of meat.
4. Meatloaf photos are kind of gross.

But then my son requested it and the whole family was so excited so I decided to just buck up and share the recipe because we totally love it and that ought to be enough reason, right? The only problem: I never got a photo of the finished meatloaf. By the time it finished baking, we were in festive-meal chaos mode and I forgot.

When I realized my mistake, all but one nub of loaf had already disappeared down the hatch, and then that last nub was gone, too. You’re not missing much, though. Just imagine a long log of cooked ground beef, the bottom of the baking dish covered with a film of juicy fat. Really, not impressive. But it sure is delicious!

Meatloaf
Adapted from the Mennonite Community Cookbook, by Mary Emma Showalter.

The original recipe calls for capping the meatloaf with raw bacon pre-baking, but I skip that step. To serve the meatloaf, I remove it from the yuck-looking baking dish and place it on a clean plate. Then I slice the loaf to facilitate the serving process and to limit the kids from going hogwild.

For Birthday Boy’s dinner, I served the meat loaf with these outrageously delicious potatoes cooked in cream (as well as corn and green beans and sourdough bread and shoofly pie with ice cream): a killer combo.

1 onion, chopped
1 cup of bread crumbs
2 egg, lightly beaten
1 generous cup milk (or tomato juice)
2 teaspoons salt
½ teaspoon black pepper
2 pounds ground beef

Combine everything but the ground beef and let sit for 15 minutes to soften. Add the ground beef and stir to combine (I use my hands). Put the mixture in a 9 x 13 baking dish and shape into a loaf. Do not pack the meat. Bake at 375 degrees for 50-60 minutes. Slice and eat. Serve with ketchup.

With the leftovers: make a sandwich of thinly sliced meatloaf, mayonnaise, spicy mustard, and lots of sweet pickles.

This same time, years previous: when your child can’t read, the quotidian (11.4.13), the nighttime barkies, piano lessons, laid flat, lemon squares, and living history.

This year’s garden was fairly low-key and non-stress, which made for a pleasant break from our normal Summer Crazy.

Stats:
rhubarb daiquiri mix, frozen: 2 batches (three little jars)
strawberries, frozen, sliced: 17 quarts
sour cherries from our trees, frozen: 8½ quarts
red raspberries, frozen: 14 quarts
zucchini relish: 13 pints
sweet pickles: 8 quarts
apricot jam, runny, canned: 6½ pints
wineberries, foraged, frozen: 2½ quarts
green peppers, cooked, frozen: 13 half-pints
blackberries, foraged, frozen: 3 cups
tomatoes, canned: 43 quarts, 3 pints
pesto, walnut-butter, frozen: about 8 half-pints
corn: 29 quarts and 18 pints
roasted tomato and garlic pizza sauce: 35½ pints
peaches, canned: 25 quarts
nectarines, dried: 17 bags (each bag roughly equaled 1½ pints)
pesto torte, 2 recipes, frozen: 16 slices
roasted tomato sauce, canned: 12 pints
sweet potatoes: 1 bushel

Notes:
*Planting an entire row of cucumbers was slightly insane. We gave away bushels.
*Same for seven zucchinis. But they were lovely and the plants refused to die!
*FYI: 45 dozen ears of corn yields about 80 quarts of corn. (We shared with fellow corn processors.)
*The family is crazy about the pesto torte. Make at least two batches every year, please.
*No grapes this year because my husband pruned them too vigorously. Thankfully, we still have jam from 2014.
*The red raspberries weren’t that great. Remember to fertilize (and only chop them back to about one-foot high) them in February.
*We got apricots and pears and cherries! If we remember to spray next year, we’d get a lot more!
*The strawberry crop was underwhelming. Hopefully, that’s because it’s the first year of production.
*Five pepper plants is a good amount.
*For some odd reason, the basil died halfway through the season. Plant them by the rhubarb next year to see if they do better.
*We have no tomato juice and I miss it. Don’t forget to make some next year.
*Besides not doing green beans (oodles still in the freezer or potatoes (so buggy last year that it’s not worth the trouble), we also did not put up applesauce or salsa. We aren’t going through nearly as much applesauce as we used to, and we still had plenty of salsa (which we love) from the year before.

This same time, years previous: chatty time, posing for candy, cheesy broccoli potato soup, why I’m spacey, sweet and sour lentils, Greek yogurt, oatmeal bread, and blessing hearts.