Fold My Laundry Please

While reading blogs yesterday, I came across what appeared to be a delicious recipe, bacon wrapped mini meatloaf.  It looked beautiful.  It was easy to make.  I had all of the ingredients in the cupboard already.  It involved bacon.  Wednesday nights are the one night a week that we just stay home, so it was the perfect opportunity to try out a new meal.  Goodness knows our menu could use some fresh blood. 

I want to start out by saying I’m not knocking this recipe.  I’m simply revisiting my own personal experience with it. 

Okay? 

Okay.

Everything started well.  I mixed up the ingredients, wrapped it all in bacon, and set it in the recommended type of pan.  While that cooked, I got to work on the side dishes.  I had decided on buttered noodles and steamed broccoli.  The timer dinged and I took the meatloaf out of the oven.  One poke with the fork told me it was still severely undercooked.  No problem.  I just put it back in the oven, this time using a meat thermometer instead of the kitchen timer.  Meanwhile, our side dishes had finished and were already cooling. 

Finally, the thermometer beeped and it was time to eat.  We were greeted with little balls of meat swimming in tons of grease.  Yum.  I took them out of the pan and set them on paper towels to drain.  They looked…unappetizing at best.  Oh well, maybe they tasted fine.  I served up the plates of food and the kids immediately went to work tearing off the bacon and gobbling it up.  My husband and I stared at our plates.  More grease was oozing out of the meat and soaking into our cold noodles and broccoli.  Again, yum.  I took a bite.  It wasn’t bad, tasty in fact, just greasy. 

Now I’m not one to say cooking with grease is bad.  I love to deep fry french fries and my infamous corned beef hash is cooked entirely in the stuff, but the amount of grease coming out of our food was not a good thing.  I had even used super lean ground beef to minimize this highly possible outcome.  I went back and read the comments to the post with the recipe and the greasy possibilities were brought up by several commenters, but the author assured everyone that it really wasn’t a problem.  And she’s pretty skinny (unless she’s hiring a model to pose with her family for pictures), so I’m sure she doesn’t normally serve bacon grease as a side dish.

Oh well.  You never know if you’ll like it if you don’t try it.

I’m sure I must’ve done something wrong.  It’s not like I’m known for my culinary prowess.  If her family eats this on a regular basis, they must get vastly different results than I did.  It’s a good thing I had planned to make chocolate chip cookies for dessert.  I may not be able to successfully make most main dishes, but cookies, that’s where my talent lies!