Microwave Meatloaf – It’s a Revelation!

Well, maybe it’s not that great.  But it is surprisingly good!

Last time we had temps above 90 this summer, I was totally unprepared.  So, realizing how hot it was going to be this week, I got my act together and planned a menu of mainly cold or microwaved meals.  When I told friends that I was going to microwave a meat loaf, “eww – gross” was the immediate reaction.  Given my history in the kitchen, they had a pretty good chance of being right.  But I’m happy to report that they were so wrong!  Microwave meatloaf is about as tasty/tasteless (depending on your view of meat loaf) as one done in the conventional oven and takes only 10 minutes instead of 50.

I got my recipe where I have found many other good ones:  Better Homes and Gardens New Dieter’s Cookbook.  Not only was my meat loaf quick, it was healthy too!  Ha!

Microwave Meat Loaf with Garden Sauce (sauce not pictured!) Looks YUCK but tastes pretty good.

Here’s what was in it:

regular veggie soup mix

low-fat yogurt

dried dillweed

beaten egg

ground beef

shredded carrot

chopped celery

quick-cooking oats

Dinner Improv Disasters

Mystery meat’s got nothin’ on what I served up this past Tuesday and Wednesday.

I freely admit I am not a  good cook, even on my best days in the kitchen.  I burn teapots, forget key ingredients for soups (celery), and have made some really disgusting things involving lamb.  I’m not passionate about sauteing, broiling, boiling, braising, or roasting (unless its marshmallows).   I really consider myself more of a “food provider.” I do okay as long as I follow a recipe and have all the listed ingredients.

Glop, on the other hand, is a talented chef, serving up coq a vin, mahi mahi, pork tenderloin, and other restaurant quality fare on the weekends.  He can season on the fly and tweak recipes in his sleep.  So I feel a little pressured to take things a notch above frozen pizza and fish sticks on the weeknights.  Hence I do a lot of planning for every meal I make.  But somewhere between the fridge and the table, things can go a little haywire.  Take this past week, for example.

As Tuesday’s dinner hour approached,  Toddler began her daily rant of “I hungee.  I hungee Mommy.”  Glop had yet to materialize.  And I had failed to defrost the chicken for the “quick and easy” dinner I had so meticulously planned. The girls and I had to be out the door within the half hour for a running clinic, just to throw an extra wrench in the works.

So, to the pantry.  Fast Mac and frozen peas for the littles.  Easy.  (Why don’t I just do that every night?)  But what to serve Glop?

I stood before well-stocked pantry closet and breathed deeply.  I closed my eyes and grabbed a can of black beans.  Then I did the unthinkable (at least in our little fam).  I worked with a recipe off the can for black bean and corn salad.  Mind you, this was not Goya or Green Giant.  We’re talking store brand. What’s worse  is that I didn’t have all the ingredients, so I improvised.  The result was something I can only describe as YUCK.

Tomatoes do not make a good substitute for red peppers.  And garlic powder just does not do the work of real garlic.  But because I do not have Glop’s culinary sixth sense,  we suffered.

The next day, we moved on to YUCK’s sequel, YUCK II, which actually featured meat but was far worse than the original YUCK.  Once again, I deviated from plan, this time because it was 90 degrees out, Glop was not home, and the tots were simmering.  I had at least thawed and marinated chicken.  Working off the cuff, I whipped out my ancient Foreman grill, boiled some pasta, and cut up Kalamata olives and cherry tomatoes.  I doused it all  in a concoction of olive oil and lemon juice and gave it a good tossing.  I thought my improv skills were really improving until Sunny said it was gross and Glop declared it had an “off” taste.  It did indeed have an off taste, but what the hell – it was food, we were hungry,  we ate it.  And then I threw the Foreman away.

My takeaways from this experience:

1)  Foreman grills were not meant to last 10 years and still produce edible food.

2)  Always stock the freezer with fish sticks, frozen pizza, and, in case of inclement weather, Hot Pockets and Lean Cuisine.

3)  If you’re not a good cook, act like one at your own peril.

4)  Food is food, and many people don’t have any.  So be grateful for what you do have, whether it’s Fast Mac or YUCK.

Stirring it Up in the Kitchen

Paint, that is.  I finally have an update on our kitchen “transformation.”  Sadly, I do not have earth-shaking before and after photos.  I have no Ty Pennington on hand to “move that bus.”  But I do have insight into how renovations happen in real life.  Slowly.  Painfully.  With dust and splinters and lots of fighting.  Paint splatters and misplaced screws.  Ruined $15 paint brushes, last minute trips to Home Depot, agitation, frustration and similar states of being.  We sand a board, we have a bout of hand-foot-and-mouth disease.  We slap on a coat of paint, we have a lawn to mow.  We attach hardware to one cabinet, then it’s out for groceries or gymnastics.  I’d like to say the kitchen is a priority, but when I look back at the past two months, life really comes first.  I can see why people shell out the big bucks for turnkey renovations.

So here’s what’s new since my last update in April (APRIL!).

We’ve gone from this:

to this:

You can laugh now.  But it looks good, no?   By the time we finish, my hair will be the same color as my cabinets.

Making progress in the kitchen

Four coats of paint, one protective top coat and ten days later…my newly repainted kitchen cabinet box.  This is going to be a long project.

The protective top coat is the trickiest part because you have to keep dust from settling on the newly painted and very sticky surface.  It wasn’t too difficult doing the box in the house (as I mentioned, my cabinets are site built, and so cannot be taken down), but painting the doors out in the garage has been painful.  I did dutifully clean the garage before this project began, but a few weeks of Glop and the girls trekking the car, ride-ons and bikes in and out has totally negated my efforts.  It’s just not possible to stop the flow of traffic in and out of the garage altogether.  We will need to find a new location for painting the top coat on the doors.  Or live with lots of little dirt and fiber particles adorning our cabinets. Yuck.

Kitchen Dreams…Dashed

Home ownership has involved more personal manual labor than I ever thought possible.  While we have made the decision not to put the fence in ourselves, we have decided to take on the kitchen.  After a lot of research and numerous quotes we have decided that the cost of our dream kitchen would far exceed the amount typically suggested for a kitchen renovation (about 10-15% of a home’s worth).  Our home value has tanked since 2006, so our dream kitchen would end up at about 20%, and we’re not sure we’ll be staying in one place long enough to recoup the cost.

So I spent today painting our kitchen cabinets, as I have spent every day for the last two and half weeks.  Glop, feeling the need to do something about our circa 1970 site-built cabinets, bought an allegedly “all-in-one” cabinet painting system from Home Depot earlier this month.  The system, called Rust-Oleum Cabinet Transformations, is not quite as turnkey as we’d hoped.  In addition to the kit’s suggested two coats of furniture-grade paint, we’ve had to do double coats of a super duty Zinsser primer.  I do not blame the kit, but rather the transformation we are trying to make – from dark, cherry stained cabinets (pictured below) to pristine white.

My original kitchen cabinets.

I am now suffering alongside Glop in what has to be our most ambitious DIY project yet.  In addition to doing the cabinets, we are going to replace the current green laminate counter (probably with more laminate), paint the walls, and perform a few other cosmetic updates.  But I believe it will all be worth it in the end, which I’m guessing will be somewhere around late summer!  I will post pictures as we progress.