Minnesota Cooking: Ground Beef Meatloaf Recipe With Wild Rice Filling

I cooked the wild rice first. We ate it for supper last night, so I had a couple cups of it just laying in the fridge. So, I will use it up in the meatloaf.

We buy those tubes of hamburger at Sam's Club and I cut them up into sections and freeze them so I have about four cups of ground beef that I thawed out here. I am going to start by preheating my oven to 350 degrees.[I brought my laptop into the kitchen and I lost my mouse...]

Kinda tricky getting out of this screen without it.

I have always stated that I need my own show for cooking when I do dumb things in the kitchen. It would be done like Julia Child used to do, except mine would be more like: Here we have the meatloaf going into oven number one... on the bottom shelf... and here we have the meatloaf coming out of the oven, also from oven number one... [never revealing that this was take three...because the first meatloaf caught on fire and we had to wait to film this until the fire trucks left..]

Would it also be cool if I said it with an accent? Perhaps with a Minnesota Accent?

Sure, you betcha!

I better check another recipe. I have to see if I normally use 2 or 4 eggs. I think I have doubled the recipe I usually use. Page 462 in the Family Circle Encyclopedia of Cooking, The recipe that I usually alter is called Glazed Meat Loaf. A normal batch uses 2 eggs, so I will use four today.

Everything has to make sense with how much hamburger you are using. If you use more hamburger, it makes sense to add another egg for binder.

I have decided to caramelize the onions, so I'm slicing the onion into pieces and placing them in the frying pan with butter so they get tanned up. I'll do that while I mix my eggs with the rest of the seasonings.

Start with seasonings.

• 1 envelope Lipton Recipe Secrets Savory Herb and Garlic
• 1 small can 5.5 oz. V8 Original
• 2 teaspoons of Worchestershire Sauce
• 1 can 10 oz. Campbells Beefy Mushroom soup
• 1/2 cup of ketchup

Now. I need to stir all of that.

Okay. This is where I guess I'll add my onions, wild rice and I'll put a small can of mushrooms.

so:

• 1/4 cup caramelized onions
• 2 cups cooked wild rice
• 1 cup
• frozen dehydrated mushrooms [see my page on dehydrating mushrooms]
• black pepper [I counted thirty squeezes from my pepper squeezer]
• 4 cups ground beef

Stir all of this together. You'll have to cut through the ground beef with the fork and just keep cutting the mixture through it.

I need to mix some crackers in with all of this. It supposedly attaches to the eggs so the eggs are connected. Like a dot to dot picture. Otherwise, I'd assume you'd have a mess.

Let me count my crackers. I'm putting my crackers in a ziplock bag and I'm going to smash them into small pieces. I had two partial packages.49 crackers.Smash them flat. To the beat of "Getting Strong Now"

350 Degrees for an hour. All recipes say to cook until meatloaf pulls from sizes of pan. Just to be on the safe side, I lightly sprayed my non-stick pans with no-stick cooking spray. I use a butter flavored store brand.

One large and two small containers. I placed them on a large baking sheet so just in case they decide to boil over, I don't have to clean the oven later.

The hamburger will make juice and the V8 and onions will add to the moisture, so, it's a good idea to protect the oven floor. Who knows. It may not happen, but to be on the safe side...

Preparation time took almost two solid hours, but, that's because of you, dear reader. I was taking pictures and typing in between steps. This probably would have taken less than a half an hour if I were 'by myself'...

Smile.

I was asked what the sodium level in this was. In a can of V8, the sodium level is 640. The meatloaf recipe is about 20 servings, so 640 divided by 20 is 32 mg per serving. The Beefy Mushroom is 890 mg or 900 x 3= 2700 mg divided by 20 is 100 mg per serving and the Lipton soup mix is 580 x 8 or 600 x 8 = 4800 mg divided by 20 or 240 mg per serving so a total of 372 mg per serving.

You could substitute salt free V8 and Sodium Free Beefy Mushroom and reduce the salt to 240 mg per serving. I don't know if they make a sodium free version of the Lipton Recipe secrets.