one of the best meatloafs......ever

I spent some time recently rethinking the "mission statement" for our family blog - not that we have a formal mission statement, but something that takes a considerable amount of time should have a pretty clear purpose. You can see, there are several blogs I try to follow faithfully. Some of these bloggers are inspiring for different reasons - some are honest, some are amazingly witty, some are very helpful and insightful, some are raw, full of emotion, and challenging. I wanted our blog to be a honest sneak peek into who we are, what we do, why we decide what we decide...in all facets of our life, whether it be our leisure time, normal day in and day out operations (like parenting, cooking, etc.), or special events.

One of the things I haven't blogged about in a while is cooking/baking. I'm not sure why - but I just haven't and it is not due to not having ample opportunities. Ben got a wicked awesome smoker/griller earlier in the summer (oh, the Big Green Egg) so we have had the pleasure of having many people over for ribs, ribs, and more ribs, for pulled pork, for salmon, for burgers...and all the fixings. It's been an awesome way to spend time getting to know people, and loving on them. My husband is becoming quite the smoker/griller dude.

I undertook to learn how to work the egg this weekend, and grilled burgers. The results were quite good (beef is good on charcoal!) and I feel a little more confident in my egg abilities. Big Green Egg folks would call it my eggbilities (everything they talk about and sell has the word "egg" in it some where. There are even EggFests all over North America!!).

Well, with such meat fests on the weekends, I haven't done much cooking during the week, other than some pretty basic stuff (which I really don't mind. Eating simply during the week has freed up cash for our meat weekends too!). I had some hamburger that I wanted to use last week, so I decided to try a new recipe, Ratatouille Meatloaf (I love Rose Reisman recipes, and lucky me, I have two of her cookbooks). You must run home (or to your kitchen) and try this without delay (unless you are a vegetarian, or you don't like beef, but come on, who doesn't love beef??!! Okay, sorry, Suzanne). Let me add some comments on the recipe, whether you find them helpful or not.

1. First, I didn't use olives. Ben and Ro both don't like them. 
2. Ben also doesn't like goat cheese. Sucker. But he gave me his so I love him (another reason added to the hundred million quatrillion reasons). 
3. One of those big eggplants that you normally see in the produce section of the grocery store is more like 4 cups of eggplant (I sauteed the leftover eggplant at lunch today - heavenly!!). 
4. Half of a medium zucchini is about 1 cup.
5. Use a plain tomato pasta sauce as the flavours in this recipe are great as is.
6. I had run out of oregano so I made it without this wonderful herb. The results were still deeeelish!
7. The photo included with this recipe looks disgusting. I will take a picture of mine next time (I finished the leftovers tonight so a photo op is not possible)....

Stay tuned for more fun recipes, questions, and a mama sharing how her oldest child does on her first full day of school (so far, so good FYI).
Tam