Homemade Meatloaf

Homemade Meatloaf... Meatloaf is actually one of those odd comfort foods that I always think I don't really like. But recently, as I believe I've mentioned here before, I found a great solution at my local Mariano's. It's already mixed with all the herbs etc and then you just bake it. But I came to the conclusion that meatloaf should be in my personal repertoire of go to dishes so I've looked at a lot of meatloaf recipes online. They all have some "secret" but none of them seemed like ones I wanted to follow to a T, mostly they just provided some good inspiration - plus I already stocked up on a few ingredients I thought I might want to use so that was also a driving factor.

What I Used:
1.5 lbs ground beef
2 slices of white bread (crusts removed and torn into small pieces)
1 cup of milk to soak the bread in (I'm estimating a cup, might be more, just cover the bread with it in a bowl)
Handful of chopped parsley
1 egg
1 pouch of onion soup mix
A spoonful of plain diced tomatoes (I had these leftover from the tortilla soup)
Salt and Pepper

Other things you could add:
Sauteed onion
Crushed garlic
Worcestershire
Breadcrumbs instead of bread
The list goes on...


I started by removing the crusts of the bread and tearing it into small pieces. I'd seen this tactic of water or milk soaked bread instead of bread crumbs in a number of recipe's so I decided to go with it. I let it sit in a small bowl of milk while I dumped everything else into another bowl. Literally all of those things go in one big bowl. Once the bread was down soaking I squeezed out the excess liquid and added it to the other ingredients and gave the whole thing a vigorous mix by hand. Once It felt like the ingredients were evenly distributed I put the ground beef in a loaf pan and baked it at 375 for about an hour and 5 minutes. I cut into it 40 minutes and then let it keep cooking, continually checking.

It was incredibly moist and about 10 minutes before taking it out of the oven I actually drained a bit of the juices in the pan. I saw other recipes online that actually just form it into a loaf shape and cook it on a baking sheet - that is a good option if  you don't have a loaf pan (I also noticed those ones tended to be topped with slabs of bacon, also not a bad idea.

Anywho this was incredibly easy and so Dahlicious - I think the bread was a must try and the tomatoes also added a nice little change of flavor when you got one in a bite. Hope this inspires everyone to try making a meatloaf from scratch with all your favorite things involved!