Pasta Salad and Mini Meatloaves: Just Another Foodie Saturday

Readers!  The Foodie has the materials she needs to make amazing food!  We got eggs, and ground beef, and orzo pasta, and...okay, I'll calm down.

But seriously.  Having ingredients to cook with makes a huge difference in the Amateur Foodie kitchen. 

Lunch today was another Greek-inspired dish, this time an orzo salad.  I prepped a vinaigrette dressing with red wine vinegar, minced garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper, plus a dash of dried oregano.  The oh-so-essential accoutrements portion of the dish included sliced pepperoncini that I chopped up even smaller (leave them as-is and they take over the whole dish!), quartered black olives (nothing special...I would've liked some nice vinegary Kalamata olives, but I worked with what we had), meticulously chopped cherry tomatoes (lose the seeds and the jelly-like medium they're suspended in, and you lose a great emulsifying agent! Plus, you don't want to crush those little babies), cucumber diced up teeny-tiny (seeds removed, of course), and feta cheese.

My best piece of advice is to put the hot pasta into the dressing and toss.  This keeps the starches in the orzo from making your pretty salad into a bowl of pasta clumps and veggies.  Then chill, baby, chill!  You cannot.  I repeat, you cannot put crisp, delicious fresh veggies into hot pasta and expect them to remain crisp and delicious.  Think I'm wrong?  Try it.  Be disappointed.  But don't say I didn't warn you.

Unfortunately, there is no photo of the pasta.  Put it this way, I didn't make a lot of it, and my mom and I really liked it.  Really.

Our second topic of discussion this evening is meatloaf.  Calm yourselves!  I call myself a foodie, yet I'm preparing stuff like meatloaf?  Yes.  Yes I am.

Because, truth be told, sometimes I just crave meatloaf.  It was never something we had on a regular basis, so I never got tired of it, and I never ate enough bad meatloaf to get on the bandwagon with the people who hate it.

Meatloaf can be really delicious if you have fresh ingredients and a good recipe.  Still too un-foodie-like for you?  Well, get ready.  I'm about to tell you what's up.

Mashed potatoes and a gloriously glazed mini meatloaf.  Notice the elegant white plate?  Mmhmm.  Fancy.

Mini.  Meatloaf.  Muffins.  Heck yes.  Something about making a big ol' meatloaf in a little muffin tin turns it into the most twee, foodie-like thing ever.  Yes, twee.  Cutesy.  Like Zooey Deschanel's outfits.  Or kittens with bows around their necks.  Meatloaf's never looked tastier.

Pick your favorite meatloaf recipe (if you don't have one already, find one, for crying out loud!).  Make it as you normally would, and divide the meat into lightly greased muffin tins (use cooking spray or olive oil...not butter and flour).  Cooking times can be dicey, so keep an eye on your mini loaves.

In my opinion, an important aspect of foodie-ness is an ability to adapt a recipe.  To make it better, obviously.  So here are some changes I made to my standard-issue meatloaf recipe (from that plaid cookbook that pretty much everybody owns).

• Sauteed onions:  The recipe just says to add a quarter cup of chopped onion, raw (raw?!?) to the meat mixture.  From past experience, the onion just ends up with a weird consistency.  It's not done enough for me, so before I assembled the mix, I sauteed my onion in some canola oil over low heat until it was slightly golden (and certainly no longer raw.  Nothing ruins a velvety, soft meatloaf like biting into a big chunk of onion).  Be sure to cool it thoroughly before adding it to the meat!
• Italian breadcrumbs:  The recipe calls for plain, dry breadcrumbs.  We only had panko or Italian-seasoned, and the last time I used panko in a meatloaf recipe, it was just strange.  Italian crumbs it was, then.  And, might I add, they were delicious.  That little bit of herbage offers another dimension of flavor that does just enough to help the meatloaf without being overpowering.
• Muffin tins!  There are no instructions for making meatloaf muffins in my cookbook.  Quite the oversight, I think.  The cook time for a free-form 9-inch diameter patty was 50 minutes at 350 Fahrenheit.  So I cooked the muffins for 30 minutes at 350.  Then I unmolded them.  Then they went back in for ten minutes.  Then, since my mother wasn't home yet, they went into the fridge.  Just before serving, I heated them at 350 for ten minutes without glaze, plus another ten with glaze.  You may need to play around with your cook time.  Less is more, unless your beef is still bloody in the middle.  Please don't get sick.
• Gooey glaze:  The recipe said ketchup, brown sugar, and dry mustard!  I didn't listen!  I skipped the dry mustard, adding a squish of Dijon instead.  I used uber-molasses-y dark brown sugar in lieu of the more traditional light brown.  And I added a healthy shot of Worcestershire sauce.  (I can't eat a beef dish that doesn't contain Worcestershire.  Don't ask why.  It's just good.)  And it was the best meatloaf glaze I've ever had.  It was like candy.  Only with Worcestershire sauce.

I served my mini meatloaf muffins with sour-cream-and-garlic mashed russet potatoes.  I steeped rosemary in the cooking water, and poached a garlic clove with the potatoes.  Not only did poaching make the garlic super easy to peel, it mellowed the flavor and made it easy to smash it into a paste (which mixed oh-so-nicely with my 'taters).  Tasty?  Indeed.

Embrace the Meatloaf!

~AF

Putting My Must-Haves to Work: Pepperoncini Peppers

Okay, I said I'd try to help you out.  I gave you a list of essentials, and then I didn't follow through and tell you what to do with them!

Pepperoncini peppers look like a wild card on the list.  What are you supposed to do with a spicy pickled condiment?  Actually, you can do a lot.  My suggestion today is just one example of the many possible uses of this tasty ingredient.

If you're someone who likes tuna salad sandwiches like I do, then you're gonna love this quick tip.  Use the peppers, along with some Romaine lettuce and Greek feta cheese to perk up a classic.  Instead of doing the traditional tuna, mayo, and pickle relish version of tuna salad, leave out the pickles.  Just drain the tuna really well (the peppers will add liquid back in, and we're not making tuna soup sandwiches here), then mix in just enough mayonnaise to sort of bind the tuna together.  After adding just a pinch of salt and a twist of cracked pepper, you're ready to assemble.

I always toast my bread for any sort of meat salad sandwich, whether it be crab salad, tuna salad, or chicken salad.  The bread du jour in our house this weekend was English muffins.  They actually go surprisingly well with the tuna and peppers.  I too was shocked.  You can really use any bread you like, but I prefer something a little more adventurous than just your standard white bread.  Whole grain and 12 grain bread are my favorites when I have them on hand, although a nice hearty sourdough or marble rye would also be really tasty.

So set up your bread, adding a couple leaves of romaine to the bottom piece (this keeps the underneath of your sammy from getting soggy).  Please don't chop up your lettuce.  It's not as good that way, and if your bread is still hot, it'll just wilt faster.  Top the bed of lettuce with a healthy scoop of tuna.  Then nestle a few slices of pepperoncini pepper in the tuna.  Sprinkle with crumbled feta, then finish by topping the sandwich with more lettuce and the top of the English muffin (or other slice of bread).

The spice from the pepper acts as a more flavorful and savory alternative to sweet relish, and the feta ties everything together and makes it feel a little like a Greek salad on a sandwich.  It's something to try.

You can use pepperoncinis just about anywhere you would otherwise use pickles.  And pairing them with ingredients like feta or Kalamata olives can turn something like a burger, chicken sandwich, or salad into a Greek-style treat.

Opa!

~AF