I must confess to a certain doubt as to whether I would bother with an Experimental Cookery Tuesday this week. Being on holiday next week, I have quite a lot to do before I get to go. Furthermore, this week the recipe in the book was for meatloaf, which means you immediately know it's going to take a long time. Heck, there's probably a good five minutes of instrumental before you even really get started!
However, rules are rules, and I had promised that I'd come back to this one this week, and so when I got home I duly got out the ingredients and got to work.
The meatloaf was pretty straightforward to prepare, although it was indeed quite time consuming. That said, I've shifted to using my food processor to smash up the crackers (rather than a rolling pin), which speeds things considerably. But that didn't really help on the half-hour baking stage.
While the meatloaf was baking, I also had to put together the sauce for it, which proved to be a slightly frustrating experience of not having any pans of just the right size. That's not really Jamie's fault, though - the one I do have was in the dishwasher. Anyway, I prepped the sauce, added it to the dish, and returned it to the oven.
But, what to have with meatloaf? What would be the perfect complement? And what would provide a perfect but subtle reference?
And the answer is: cous cous, of course!
So, how was it? It turned out that the meatloaf was a massive success. It wasn't quite what I had expected, but that's fine. In fact, it was surprisingly better than the beef wellington, which I hadn't expected.
So, that's a flawless 5-0 for mince, with a couple of dishes still to go. The next one is lasagne, which should be fun. I'm planning on tackling that just after I get back from France.
#35: "Krondor: the Assassins", by Raymond Feist
No comments:
Post a Comment