Y'know, I've been eating way too healthy lately, and this is probably a good thing, but sometimes you just want to clog your arteries because fuck it. That's pretty much the entire line of reasoning behind why I cooked what I cooked tonight, two things I've never actually cooked before: meatloaf and onion rings.
Now to be fair, my ingredients looks like they're gonna be pretty fucking healthy, maybe making some pasta sauce or something, right? Yeah, fuck that noise. I started off by halving the tomatoes, slicing the mushrooms, smashing and mincing the garlic, rolling and mincing the basil, cutting one red onion into rings (i.e. against the grain), and grating about a quarter of another red onion.
This is what I mean by cutting the onion into rings. You don't cut from top to bottom, but across the side. I cut the onion into quarters and pulled the rings apart.
I dumped all of the meatloaf ingredients into a bowl. In addition to the beef, garlic, and grated onion, I also added a lot of grated Romano cheese, a handful of uncooked oats, an egg, and a bit of salt. I apparently didn't take a picture of this part, but all you want to do is just smash it all up together. Just keep smashing and rolling until everything's all mixed up together. Then you stick it in a pan and bake it in the oven at 350 for 40ish minutes.
Meanwhile, I had to mix up the batter for my onion rings. I dumped in a bit of vegan cream, an egg, some flour, salt, pepper, and a dash of vegetable oil. You should know by now not to expect measurements. I don't do that shit.
All you gotta do then is mix it up and start dunking your onions. Make sure to add the flour a little at a time while you mix so you can get the consistency right. You want it to still be pretty liquid to be able to dunk your onions, but also thick enough to coat the onions.
For cooking the onion rings, you want to get a pot of vegetable oil really fucking hot, then just lay the rings in there. Let'em go for about a minute, then flip them over and let'em go about another minute and pull them out.
For my first few, the oil wasn't hot enough, so the batter washed off some and didn't brown enough.
Once it heated up, things looked a lot better, though I did overcook a few of them a little bit.
Outside of that, I just needed to work on my sauce. I added some olive oil and dropped the sliced tomatoes in skin side down and let them sauté until the skins got wrinkly, then flipped them and pulled off as much of the skin as possible. I missed a few because I was also frying onion rings at the time, so I couldn't dedicate all of my attention to it. I added some red wine and let it all simmer for a few minutes.
Meanwhile, in a separate pan, I had my sliced mushrooms caramelizing in extra virgin olive oil and a little white wine. I seasoned them with a little salt and pepper, but otherwise just let it sit on pretty low heat for about 15 minutes, at which point I dumped the tomato mixture (plus some cream and my minced basil) into the pan and let it all simmer together while the meatloaf finished.
I pulled the meatloaf out about 5-10 minutes before it was done and spooned some of the sauce on top, then stuck it back in to finish. I just wanted a little bit of a tomato topping on the meat. I am a ketchup free man (except for homemade or Whataburger spicy ketchup).
Once the onion rings and sauce were done and the meatloaf was still cooking, I also did something I've always wanted to do: I poured all my leftover batter into the boiling oil. That shit is simultaneously delectable and disgusting, and my stomach hurts after eating a bit of this while typing the blog post. But yeah, totally worth it if you don't mind the inevitable consequences of eating fried batter.
Once the meatloaf was finish, I sliced it up and threw it on a plate with some onion rings. I swear it looked better in person than in this picture, but I was fucking starving and didn't want to take another shot from a different angle.
The food was, in a word, amazing. Having cheese and garlic cooked into the meatloaf was a straight up winning move. The sauce, after reducing, was a perfect topping for it. The onion rings really hit the spot, too, and, despite some naysayers, the onion ring and meatloaf combo was very good. What I'm really looking forward to, though, is some fucking meatloaf sandwiches tomorrow. You can't beat that shit.
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