Second Saturday- January’s Plant, Pick and Prepare

Just a quick post to finish out our January edition of Plant, Pick and Prepare.  For our final Saturday Evening at Sunbird Farms in January, we had another delicious meal with family, centered around what is arguably my one culinary weakness…meatloaf.  We dined on in-season veggies from the farmer’s market like broccoli, arugula, onions and potatoes, along with wonderful grass-fed ground beef from Springville Ranch.   We paired the hearty dinner with wine from Jada Vineyard & Winery, our favorite stop for wine and cheese in Paso Robles, and a few fine IPA’s from Sierra Nevada Brewing.  Coffee and homemade brownies sealed the deal.  It was an all California dinner!

Now, back to that meatloaf.  Few things can put a bigger smile on my face than a hot meatloaf on a cold night.  For this meal we used my traditional recipe, which is basically:

1. start with the best meat you can get,
2. add lots of onions and a couple of eggs (pasture-based of course),
3. combine with a sauce (in this case, Grandma V’s secret sauce)
4. find something to hold it all together (here, oatmeal), and
5. season to taste.

For this particular dinner, we tried “meatloaf cakes,” which is basically using a muffin tin and filling the cups with meatloaf.  You get personal-sized meatloaves (is that a real word?), but the biggest benefit is how much quicker they cook.  It was no more than 30 mins to perfectly cooked meatloaf, and their diminutive size made them super easy to save the extras as leftovers.  Do you know what the only thing better than meatloaf dinner is?  Yep! meatloaf leftovers!  (thanks to my lovely wife for this next-level in meatloaf…)

I’ll just end this by saying, Grandma V’s sauce is really the coup de grace of the whole thing.  I used it in the meatloaf, on the meatloaf and on my potatoes.  I would have used it on the arugula salad and the brownies if we hadn’t run out.  As much as I would love to share this simple recipe, some things must remain a secret.  Suffice it to say it’s a combination of tomatoes and mustard that is pure meatloaf bliss!

Stay as we start to look ahead to our February Plant, Pick and Prepare in the coming weeks!

Blessings!

Sunbird Farms