Beetloaf, a Story about a Meatloaf

Valentine's Day is coming, and I'm sharing pink food. Beets are my go to pink food coloring for that vibrant color that is surprisingly found IN nature.

This story, as all good stories do, starts with a package of beef liver. You may think that's a weird way to start a post entitled Beetloaf. Let me be clear--just because I'm calling this Beetloaf in no way implies a lack of meat. There are many excellent vegetarian loaf recipes out there and this is not one of them. This just happens to be a meatloaf that also contains beets and, as it happens on my FB page, when I post something innocuous sounding like Roasted Beet & Arugula Pizza, my friends nickname it Beet-za. Today I'm skipping the middleman and going straight to the nickname:  Beetloaf.

Now, before Robert Barker arrived in our lives I didn't know what to do with all the beef liver in the freezer. [My neighbors kept bringing me more, slipping it in the house alongside the eggs when I wasn't looking.] I looked for ways to incorporate liver into our lives, much like I look for ways to incorporate beets into our meals. I hit upon an idea--what if I used beets + liver together? I know I like pickled beets in my Open-faced Liver Postej Sandwiches, so it stands to reason that I'd like them together in the same pan. I decided to add a pound of pork sausage and a pound of ground beef to the liver + beets primarily because I'd already done a mostly vegetable meatloaf, my {48.3% Meat}Loaf, and I knew the additional meat would be a hit with the teenagers. It was--my daughter dumped ketchup on it and declared it 'acceptable' (when in doubt, ketchup is my #5 tip to get your family to eat from the farm share). My son went so far as to say it was 'good'--high praise from him--and complain after I started using all the liver for Robert Barker--that he wanted to eat more beetloaf.

BOOM! Liver + beets are in our bellies and out of the freezer. That's a big win in my book.

For other recipes using liver you're going to have to wait until I create additional categories for my Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient, but there is a search function on the left sidebar in the meantime. For other recipes using beets, please see my Beet Recipes Collection, part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient. For other recipes using ground beef, please see my recipe round up of 106 Food Blogger Recipes using Ground Beef.

Mac & Cheese with Roasted Winter Squash

Classic comfort food--with the addition of a seasonal vegetable. Long-storing winter squash is cubed, roasted, and tossed into macaroni and cheese flavored with Italian sausage.

Long-storing winter squash are one of the ways that I feed my family from the farm share during the off season when we're not getting weekly boxes of fresh vegetables. For today's recipe I chose one of the squash that came from my compost pile. I'm thinking it's a cross between a butternut and a pumpkin or maybe it's an albino pumpkin like all the albino squirrels in my town. Who knows? Either way, it was a pale fleshed winter squash, part of the Strategic Winter Squash Reserve in my cold basement, and worked just as well as a pumpkin or butternut squash would in this recipe.

I don't combine this stuff on a whim, you know. [That's not exactly accurate. On Monday I posted a recipe that evolved as I was preheating the skillet and my daughter was throwing out ideas, which turned into Mardi Gras Fried Rice. Whims were involved.] Last year I took a sugar pie pumpkin from our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share and baked mac and cheese in it. I got the recipe from the versatile cookbook, Melt: The Art of Macaroni and Cheese (Amazon affiliate link). I first made that recipe before my spouse returned from a deployment. I was thinking that I had to make it again for him as the recipe is such a good one and because I crave comfort foods like mac & cheese when it's cold out. You can find that recipe here, or, if you're local to me, I donated a copy of the cookbook to my local library.

The thing is, I rarely re-make a recipe without tweaking it somehow.  [Heck, even my morning oatmeal is currently undergoing revisions.] When I was spooning that mac & cheese into the pumpkin, I wondered about skipping the adorable container/serving dish concept and instead stirring pumpkin into the mac and cheese and then baking it. I kept the rest of the elements the same because the flavors are so good together (I have made 4 or 5 recipes from MELT and each time was successful). Because the baking time is 1½ hours total, this is not a weeknight meal. However, it feeds 8 to 10 people and the leftovers reheat well, so it's a weekend meal making leftovers that could become lunches or fast dinners on hockey busy nights during the week.

For another mac and cheese recipe, please check out Macaroni and Cheese with Beet Greens, Ham and Manchego. For other recipes using winter squash, please see my Winter Squash Recipe Collection, part of my Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient.

Mardi Gras Fried Rice {Fried Rice with Purple Cabbage, Ham, Egg and Zucchini}

The colors of Mardi Gras in a fried rice--red cabbage, eggs and zucchini (with or without ham)--make this savory seasonal dish a colorful way to let the good times roll.

Why do Mardi Gras recipes have to involve pancakes or King cake? Can't we have some savory entrees alongside? I'm pretty sure the carbs and protein would help with alcohol consumption.

Howdy! I'm feeling a little sheepish here because if you subscribe via email [hey thanks!--if you don't, there's a widget along the right sidebar that makes it easy to do so] you'll know I messed up yesterday. See, I'm only sharing 3 recipes a week, but I'm cooking for the family, the team, the folks at work, and others all. the. time.  Any given week I've got a bunch more than 3 recipes that have the potential to be blog-worthy. These recipes pile up in notebooks and on scraps of paper. The photos pile up--in a well-organized fashion--in my laptop. Eventually I get around to typing them up for the blog, and when I do I tentatively schedule them for when they'd be appropriate. I've got a small butternut squash & spinach lasagna  recipe from last year that I thought would be good for February. I scheduled it for 2/1/2015 thinking that I'd sort out which Monday, Wednesday, or Friday would be best and get the post all buffed and shined [i.e., add photos and the sort of writing you're reading now].

Except I didn't realize that yesterday was February 1st, and there I was at Costco taking photos of my spouse while he tried on new eyeglass frames. [Ya know, if you need to wear glasses it's really hard to tell what you'd look like in new frames since you can't see out of them while you're trying them on . . . where was I?] Oh, right--so while I was at Costco the partially finished lasagna post automatically published, per the scheduling I did last year, and went out on email. I came home from the store to emails from my mom and Alanna notifying me. Whoops.

Now the cool thing of this very long and involved rambling is that Alanna taught me how to save all my partially finished posts as drafts, so theoretically this type of thing will never happen again. But I'd still appreciate it if you'd sign up to get the blog via email, because everyone likes bloopers now and again.