Comfort food and bacon as the universal language

Universal? What about Jewish or Muslim diners? Turkey bacon, I say.

Comfort food goes with the cooler weather we are having, so my thoughts turned to meatloaf and then on a recipe of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares we saw him put bacon wrapped meatloaf on the menu. “Wow,” thought, “wonder if we can make bacon meatloaf taste good without turning the air blue with profanity….” And so we rose to the challenge, and our dinner plan was made.

The recipe we adapted combines bacon as the meatloaf hugger; a sweet ketchup glaze, and fried onions left over from Thanksgiving – cheers to the website selfproclaimedfoodie.com for the inspiration. It’s a basic meatloaf recipe and feel free to adapt it to your favorite add ins, but we kept it pretty basic.

For 6 mini meatloaves, start with about 1 ½ pounds of ground meat – I like beef and pork but you can sneak some turkey in here. You can use straight turkey or chicken, but I suggest adding plenty of chopped and sautéed mushrooms to add some heft and extra moisture. Chop an onion and 2 cloves of garlic; saute the onion first for 3 minutes and add the garlic for 2 minutes more. Dump this in a bowl with the ground meat; a cup of breadcrumbs; a cup of milk; an egg to glue it all together; a heavy dash of Worcestershire and some thyme or parsley (or both). Note there is no added salt – between the Worcestershire and the bacon you won’t need it.

Shape the glop with your hands and don’t pack it too tight. Wash your icky hands and wrap a piece of raw bacon like a porky belt. You can put this in big muffin cups, but I agree with the blogger that this is a guaranteed grease bath, so haul out the hero parchment and line a rimmed baking sheet. Make sure it is rimmed – you’ll hate yourself otherwise.

Combine a mug full of ketchup (bout ½ cup) with a tablespoon of mustard and a tablespoon of brown sugar for the classic glaze. Top the meatloaves with this.

These take about an hour and a quarter to bake. After an hour, crown the loaves with a handful of canned fried onions for crunchy wonderfulness. You’ll know these are ready when the bacon is crisp.

Any green or yellow veg goes with this; and we also chopped up some potatoes and put them in the oven for the last 40 minutes of baked time tossed with olive oil and a little onion powder. Always, always make extra potatoes as long as you are baking – it takes a minute to chop an extra potato and you will thank yourself when you reheat them in the oven for breakfast the next day. Just reheat them in foil for 10 minutes and enjoy. Comfort food for two meals is a great thing.