Preperation Is Everything

While waiting for the next dilation procedure I have continued with my food experimentation. One thing I have found is that how the food is prepared is as important as what the food is. Meatloaf is a good example. A while back I did try one of the pre packaged frozen meatloaf dinners. Needless to say it was not overly successful. There is something about ground beef that causes it to be a problem in almost any form. Bulk sausage also suffers from the same problems except when it is made into something like sausage gravy. Even then there are problems but not as bad as ground beef. Besides properly made sausage gravy and biscuits tastes good enough to put up with the problems eating it.

After trying packaged frozen meatloaf without success I was ready to write it off. I decided to give meatloaf another try but this time make it myself. I used a mix of ground beef, pork and veal as the base meat and a recipe from AllRecipes.com with some minor substitutions. (Let's be real, who has panko bread crumbs just lying around the pantry?) Turns out the meatloaf was a success, or as much of a success as eating can be for now. This particular recipe used ketchup as one of the liquid ingredients and as the glaze. Next time I think I will substitute some Dinosaur BBQ sauce instead to add a bit more zing. (Yep... once again all that late night TV is paying off by expanding my culinary vocabulary.) The other nice thing about meatloaf is that it keeps reasonable well and reheats easily without that much degradation in quality. This is important because one of the problems I have is that most things I can eat require advance preparation and don't lend themselves to just heating up in the microwave. As much as I like to cook there are times when you just want to heat something up to eat.

Two other home made items that I can eat reasonable well and can be made in advance are potato salad and baked beans. Baked beans work out well because of the nutrition in the beans. I can eat some canned beans but I prefer the home made ones and there are some significant cost savings there. These I just make using the standard Boston Baked beans recipe from "The Joy of Cooking". Potato salad also works out well. Both of these items keep well and can be ready to eat quickly. The only real modification I make to potato salad is to drop celery from the recipe. Celery, a.k.a. The Stalk of Death, is a problem to eat on many levels at this point of time and I avoid it like the plague. When I really want to live life large I will have a Hoffman's Coney (White hot to some folk) without the bun, baked beans and potato salad. The coney is essentially pureed meat and the Hoffman's brand is the one that I can eat without too many problems.