A Good Night in the Kitchen!

Well hello, all! So I’ve been cooking with EveryPlate the last few weeks. Tonight was Sweet and Smoky BBQ Pork Meatloaves and they brought with them a couple of EveryPlate firsts.

The first first? A meal without garlic. Say whaaaa?? I know, I was shocked too. It seems like every single recipe I have had up to now used garlic in some way or another. There is no danger of vampires with this company, that is for sure!

The second first? This was the first meal I’ve had from EP that I knew for a fact if I were a regular person with a regular appetite (as opposed to a person who has had weight loss surgery and doesn’t require huge portions) I would DEFINITELY have left the table looking for my car keys to make a run to the Sonic for some cheddar bites or something!

The only thing I have ever added to an EP meal has been the veggies, specifically carrots and sweet potatoes. Tonight the two tiiiiiny sweet potatoes I unpacked wouldn’t have been enough to make Thanksgiving dinner for a Smurf! So I added a few extra wedges cut from a ginormous sweet potato I bought at my little small town grocery store. (It’s called Farmer’s Market, but it’s really not one.)

The zucchini tonight presented a particular problem at first. The recipe called for it to be halved lengthwise, but the poor thing was suffering from a curvature that made it resemble nothing so much as an old green penis. Well, I managed to follow the curve enough to halve the pen-cchini and cut it into half moons the way it was supposed to be, but it was definitely a small amount of food. Size matters!!

The thing I loved about this recipe was that it was so zen I barely knew I was cooking. Preheat the oven, chop the veggies, mix the meat, mix the sauce, toss the veggies, throw everything on the same huge pan, throw it in the oven and clean up! I didn’t follow the directions on that. The card would have had me use two baking sheets. I only used one, because it was a full size Pampered Chef bar pan. I put the two meatloaves all the way at one end, the tiny bit of zucchini in the middle, and the sweet potatoes on the far end. It all went quite well!

Another deviation from the card required me to take the food out of the oven after 20 minutes, add more sauce, and continue cooking until the sauce was tacky, to use their word, and the meat was cooked through. I decided not to do that. Every time I opened the oven, I was afraid my contacts were going to melt to my eyeballs, so I just took the pan out at 21 minutes, checked the temp on the meat, and called it good.

This is one of my few rants on this company. The recipe called for the meat to be put back into the oven until it was cooked through, but how exactly is one supposed to know that, UNLESS…. you know the temp it is supposed to be and you check it!? I wish they would say “until the meat has reached an internal temperature of …” whatever. I just think it would be better to be more precise because a lot of people who use these boxes are beginning cooks.

Fortunately, my son has an awesome thermometer he got to go with the grill he was given for Christmas a couple of years ago. I looked up the temp that meatloaves should be cooked to, (which, by the way, is 160) and when I found that they had reached it, I didn’t bother cooking them any longer, even though the recipe said to give it 3-5 more minutes.

As for the taste and flavor, well, first of all I made the mistake of tasting the ancho chili powder by itself, just out of curiosity. Big mistake! It was weirdly bitter at first and then spicy. But mixed in with the glaze and sprinkled over the sweet potatoes, it was just right- it gave them the perfect smoky spicy flavor. I briefly toyed with the idea of adding something like rosemary or marjoram to the zucchini, but decided I didn’t want to take a chance on whatever I used not pairing well with the sweet and smoky BBQ effect they were going for, so I left them plain, except for the famous salt and pepper, which EP wants you to use every time you turn around! I think I added too much to the meat mixture, because it really seemed a bit too salty.

Overall it was a wonderful meal. It was quick and easy to cook, easy to clean up, and had great flavor. One thing I would do next time is take the zucchini out sooner, because it did get a little mushy. Yep. The pen-cchini went soft.

Happy Cooking, Y’all! 😃

Until next time,

D.