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ninanevermoreI have plans for the evening, and they are not pleasant ones. My husband has requested that I make a meatloaf. I am not Suzy Homemaker by any means, but as far as certain picky eaters are concerned I make an awesome meatloaf thanks to the process handed down to me by my mother. She found a way to make a kid-friendly version of the dish using a secret ingredient best described as "Ruby's Disgusting Green Sludge."
If you've never had a sludgeloaf, I can't recommend it enough. Like most things made from ground hamburger meat, it goes great with ketchup. The Green Sludge did not spring from my mother's desire to make her children happy; it sprang from her desire to trick us into eating vegetables. The fact that we were happy was just a convenient coincidence.
Most meatloaf recipes for chopped onion, celery and possibly bell peppers, so that chunks of these things are present in every forkful of the finished product. Since the dawn of time, children have not been fond of chucks of plant matter in their food. My mother noticed that when she made meatloaf, a small pile of onion, celery and bell pepper pieces wound up on the edges of her children's plates, where they had been painstakingly extracted with surgical precision.
Knowing my mother, she probably tried reasoning with my older brothers by telling them that the items they were excluding were a) good for them and b) tasted good. These lines of reasoning are flawed and ineffective. A child doesn't care if something is good for him if he does not like it, and what tastes good to a grownup is not always what tastes good to a kid. The extraction of vegetables continued.
Not to be outdone and never one to settle for losing an argument, my mother came up with the idea of tossing the onion, celery and bell peppers into a blender with the liquid ingredients of the recipe (one cup of milk and an egg), and hitting puree until they all emerged as a frothy Green Sludge. The onions are not to blame for the horrible appearance of the sludge – they are to blame for the pungent smell it has. No, the celery is the culprit for the appearence. Even the bell peppers do not create that exact shade of lethal light green that resembles the way toxic waste is depicted in episodes of "The Simpsons." While it does not actually glow in the dark, it has a day-glow quality about it that makes a person think twice about adding it to food.
My mother was a tough woman, however, and just because something looked disgusting was no reason for her not to feed it to her children. She mixed the Sludge with the meat and the saltine crackers she used instead of breadcrumbs, and the result was a meatloaf that was uniform in texture and flavor, with no parts offensive to young palates. We didn't mind the combined flavors of the vegetables, so long as we didn’t have to bite into them individually. Thankfully, the greenness of the Sludge disappears when mixed with the meat, though a quick reading of Dr. Suess' Green Eggs and Ham before dinner might convince a reluctant youngster to try it even if it did not.
Though my mother is long gone from this world, she lives on through her meatloaf since my husband is a kid at heart when it comes to dining. He, too, hates biting into a chunk of vegetables in his meatloaf. He thinks my mother must have been a genius to come up with an idea as great as the Disgusting Green Sludge. It's easy for him to think this since he does not have to handle the Green Sludge himself. As the one who must manufacture the Sludge and then mix it with raw meat using my bare hands, I am not convinced that Sludge is superior to simply chopping the vegetables up so fine that they are too much trouble for a picky eater to extract.
Since Jeff asked sweetly and he made his eyes big and sad, I will make him a sludgeloaf. The irony that what began as a weapon created by my mother to help her win the war of Child v. Vegetable is now a way that my husband likes me to prove that I really do love him is not lost on me. Besides, I enjoy the dish myself. Like I said, it goes great with ketchup.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * # * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
If you've never had a sludgeloaf, I can't recommend it enough. Like most things made from ground hamburger meat, it goes great with ketchup. The Green Sludge did not spring from my mother's desire to make her children happy; it sprang from her desire to trick us into eating vegetables. The fact that we were happy was just a convenient coincidence.
Most meatloaf recipes for chopped onion, celery and possibly bell peppers, so that chunks of these things are present in every forkful of the finished product. Since the dawn of time, children have not been fond of chucks of plant matter in their food. My mother noticed that when she made meatloaf, a small pile of onion, celery and bell pepper pieces wound up on the edges of her children's plates, where they had been painstakingly extracted with surgical precision.
Knowing my mother, she probably tried reasoning with my older brothers by telling them that the items they were excluding were a) good for them and b) tasted good. These lines of reasoning are flawed and ineffective. A child doesn't care if something is good for him if he does not like it, and what tastes good to a grownup is not always what tastes good to a kid. The extraction of vegetables continued.
Not to be outdone and never one to settle for losing an argument, my mother came up with the idea of tossing the onion, celery and bell peppers into a blender with the liquid ingredients of the recipe (one cup of milk and an egg), and hitting puree until they all emerged as a frothy Green Sludge. The onions are not to blame for the horrible appearance of the sludge – they are to blame for the pungent smell it has. No, the celery is the culprit for the appearence. Even the bell peppers do not create that exact shade of lethal light green that resembles the way toxic waste is depicted in episodes of "The Simpsons." While it does not actually glow in the dark, it has a day-glow quality about it that makes a person think twice about adding it to food.
My mother was a tough woman, however, and just because something looked disgusting was no reason for her not to feed it to her children. She mixed the Sludge with the meat and the saltine crackers she used instead of breadcrumbs, and the result was a meatloaf that was uniform in texture and flavor, with no parts offensive to young palates. We didn't mind the combined flavors of the vegetables, so long as we didn’t have to bite into them individually. Thankfully, the greenness of the Sludge disappears when mixed with the meat, though a quick reading of Dr. Suess' Green Eggs and Ham before dinner might convince a reluctant youngster to try it even if it did not.
Though my mother is long gone from this world, she lives on through her meatloaf since my husband is a kid at heart when it comes to dining. He, too, hates biting into a chunk of vegetables in his meatloaf. He thinks my mother must have been a genius to come up with an idea as great as the Disgusting Green Sludge. It's easy for him to think this since he does not have to handle the Green Sludge himself. As the one who must manufacture the Sludge and then mix it with raw meat using my bare hands, I am not convinced that Sludge is superior to simply chopping the vegetables up so fine that they are too much trouble for a picky eater to extract.
Since Jeff asked sweetly and he made his eyes big and sad, I will make him a sludgeloaf. The irony that what began as a weapon created by my mother to help her win the war of Child v. Vegetable is now a way that my husband likes me to prove that I really do love him is not lost on me. Besides, I enjoy the dish myself. Like I said, it goes great with ketchup.
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great with ketchup.
Date: 2007-04-24 09:05 pm (UTC)Re: great with ketchup.
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Date: 2007-04-24 10:45 pm (UTC)i make my meatloaf with half pork sausage and half hamburger.
we eat veggies first then the main dish and desert.
but I appreciate your effort to get veggies into them.
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Date: 2007-04-25 10:06 pm (UTC)If you need more help than that, try this:
Take:
* 1.5 to 2 pounds ground meat (whatever, I'm not that exact of a person)
* 1 cup milk
* 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
* 1 egg
* 1 small onion
* 2 stalks celery
* if you like bell pepper (I don't) then toss one of those in, too
* as much salt as you generally like in 2 pounds of meat
* ditto for ground black pepper
* a generous dash of parsley flakes and any other herbs (a little Mrs. Dash Garlic and Herb is always nice) you are fond of in your meatloaf
* 1 cup of bread crumbs (or crushed saltine crackers)
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
Coarsely chop onions and celery (and peppers, if applicable) and toss into blender with milk and egg and blend until mixture is a smooth and Disgusting Green Sludge. In a large mixing bowl, add all other ingredients and pour Sludge on top. Steal your resolve and mix and mash the horror in the bowl until it is uniform. Dig out whichever dish you use to make meatloaf in at your house (I use a rectangular bread pan) and form into a nice loaf shape. Toss into heated oven for 1 to 1.5 hours or until your husband's BBQ fork with the thermometer in it tells you the center is 160 degrees F and that the chance of dieing from e-coli has been obliterated.
Serve with ketchup. Mashed potatoes go nicely as a side dish (instant is fine, I won't tell anyone).
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Date: 2007-04-25 10:43 pm (UTC)