Basic Cooking Skills: Meatloaf

Every other Thursday we will post about different basic cooking skills. Knowing how to prepare meals from scratch is a very important step in becoming self-reliant, which in turn is a crucial component of being prepared. Being able to cook meals for your family will give you confidence, more family togetherness time, and lower your food budget=more money for food storage! If you have a basic cooking skill you'd like to learn, email us! These meals contain perishable food items as this is a different series than our food storage recipes.

Two factors that apply when feeding my family are: how healthy a meal is--and how many dishes it dirties. This meal is a three dish cleanup. Pretty nice.



Ingredients: ground beef, egg, ketchup, onion, bread crumbs, chili sauce, red currant jelly, salt and pepper


Combine the jelly and the chili sauce in a small saucepan on the stove over medium heat to melt the jelly.


Chop up a half cup of the onion. When you have extra onion, you can chop it all up and freeze it in a freezer bag, or wrap the remaining uncut onion in plastic wrap and then in a plastic bag and stick it in the fridge. You want the extra layer of protection the plastic wrap affords so the onion doesn't stink up anything else in the fridge. Onions that have been refrigerated are less potent, meaning, you won't cry as much when you cut them.



Dump all the ingredients, except for the chili sauce and jelly, into a bowl



Mix it all up. To really combine all the meat, you have to take off your rings/any other jewelry and dig your hands in. Just don't forget to wash your hands really well afterward. Raw meat can carry a lot of bacteria and parasites that are only killed after being well cooked.


Pick up the meat mixture and put it into a loaf pan. You can do one large, or two medium and freeze the extra pan.


When your jelly/sauce mixture has melted and combined,


Pour half of the sauce over the raw meatloaf




Bake



Keep the remaining half of the sauce warm, and then pour it over the baked meatloaf. This is a great meal to stretch your buck---you only need a pound of meat to feed an entire family.


Sweet and Sour Meatloaf
Favorites


1 (12-oz) jar red currant jelly
1 (12-oz) jar chili sauce

1 pound ground beef
1 cup bread crumbs
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
1 egg
1/2 cup ketchup

To prepare sauce, combine red currant jelly and chili sauce in a saucepan. Heat until jelly is melted and well-blended.

For meatloaf, combine ground beef, bread crumbs, chopped onions, salt, pepper, egg and ketchup and mold into a 5 x 9 loaf pan. Pour half of sauce over meatloaf and bake for 1 hour at 400 degrees F. Heat remaining sauce and serve with meatloaf.