Since I live in Drescher, I have my own kitchen. Unfortunately, mainly due to my schedule, I don’t get to use my kitchen as often as I would like. Having a kitchen is not something that is new to me; I had one in Lovernich. What is different? How I approach said kitchen. While last semester I would only use the kitchen to make eggs, this year I’ve tried to venture into other functionalities of a kitchen. Did you know that a stove has this thing called an oven that can be used to make an entire variety of different dishes as well as desserts?!
From now until the end of the semester, I will cook at least one meal per week in my apartment. This meal will not be Top Ramen or scrambled eggs. It will be an actual recipe, more often than not passed down from my mom, who, bless her soul, has fed me delicious food as far back as I can remember.
Not knowing where to start with this culinary adventure, I turned to one of my friends who enjoys cooking in her humble abode. Just as I was looking for a recipe to cook, she was trying to get rid of a little more than a pound and a half of ground beef. According to her, she had the ground beef for a long time but she claimed it was OK because it had been in her freezer all this time. Seeing as everyone that ate the meatloaf I made that night is still alive and well, I believe her.
Meatloaf is something that is relatively new to me. You see, in Mexican culture there are a lot of other things one can do with ground beef. I’m pretty certain my madre has never made meatloaf for dinner. Much like my opinion of the SAC, she would wonder why something so bland is still being used.
Nonetheless, I set aside my prejudice and committed to the task at hand.
The cooking process was surprisingly fun up to the point where you have to wait for the food to cook. As a product of the generation that seeks instant gratification, this doesn’t sit well with me.
My friend and I started by chopping an onion and putting it in a pan with a little bit of cooking oil and letting it cook. Then we dumped the ground beef into a bowl and started mixing in the Italian breadcrumbs, the egg, the Worcestershire sauce, the salt, the pepper and the milk. This was by far the most fun, taking me back to my play-doh day — except this time it was more dangerous to eat what I was molding. My friend wasn’t amused with my handling of the ground beef and insisted that I stopped before I got ground beef everywhere. Much to her dismay, her advice came in too late.
Once it was mixed, we placed the concoction in a bread pan and began to work on the sauce that would go on top. The sauce was made of a simple mix of mustard, ketchup and brown sugar. We mixed it all together and put it over the ground beef.
We placed the ground beef in the oven, which was preheated to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, to cook for about an hour. In the mean time my friend proceeded to make deep fried carrots à la Paula Deen. I tried to warn her about the dangers of cooking with too much butter, but she wouldn’t believe me. Unfortunately enough, or amusingly enough depending on your sense of humor, Paula Deen came out with Type II diabetes on Tuesday.
Besides the carrots cooked in butter, my friend and I also made a salad and cooked some broccoli. The best part of our evening was sitting down with friends and enjoying the fruits of our labor, labor that started when we purchased the ingredients at our local grocery store.
