When you’ve only got a few minutes to cook dinner and you don’t want to eat preservative laden pre-cooked meals, having a traditional meatloaf and mashed potatoes dinner is a great choice for a quick easy dinner meal.
Making an investment in several packages of ground beef, while shopping at your local supermarket, is a good idea as well. If you can catch a sale on beef, that’s even better. This way, when you need to put together a quick meal, you always know you can grab the ground beef and make a meatloaf.
This recipe for Garden Meatloaf uses a total of six ingredients. All you need is two pounds of ground beef, a small onion, some brown sugar, one egg, a jar of salsa and some dry bread crumbs. Most of these ingredients you probably already have in your kitchen or pantry.
You should also invest in a couple of loaf pans to make baking your meatloaf a piece of cake. You’ll create a mildly spicy loaf that is pretty tasty. This loaf takes about an hour to bake.
=> Garden Meatloaf
1-1/2 pounds ground beef chuck, 1/2 cup chopped onion, 1/2 cup brown sugar, 1 egg, beaten, 1 (15 oz.) jar chunky salsa, 1-1/2 cups dry bread crumbs.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Prepare a 9×5-inch loaf pan with cooking spray.
In a large bowl, combine the beef chuck, onion, brown sugar, egg, salsa and bread crumbs. Mix thoroughly with a large spoon or your hands.
Place the meatloaf mixture into the loaf pan; gently press down. Bake for one hour, or until the loaf is firm and lightly browned. Take loaf out of the oven and let it cool for 5 to 10 minutes before serving.
When having meatloaf, it’s hard not to think of having mashed potatoes as a side dish. Meatloaf just seems to taste better with fluffy potatoes. Since our Garden Meatloaf is pretty lean and healthy, we will continue this healthy theme to our mashed potatoes.
To save time, you can make the mashed potatoes while the meatloaf is in the oven cooking. These Low Fat Mashed Potatoes have a total of seven ingredients: baking potatoes, shallots, yogurt, salt and pepper, nutmeg and butter.
=> Low Fat Mashed Potatoes
2 pounds of baking potatoes, peeled and quartered, 2 large shallots, thinly sliced, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 cup plain nonfat yogurt, 1/8 teaspoon black pepper, dash of nutmeg (optional), 1-1/2 cup of butter, cut into 4 slices.
In a large saucepan, add in all of the quartered potatoes and the sliced shallots. Add enough cold water to the pan to cover the potatoes by one inch. Add in 1/2 teaspoon of salt.
Bring potatoes to a boil. Reduce heat. Cover the pan and cook the potatoes for 15 to 20 minutes, or until they are tender. Reserve 3/4 cup of the cooking water. Drain the potatoes in a colander.
Return the potatoes and shallots to the pan and mash with a potato masher, until nice and smooth. With an electric mixer on medium setting, beat in the yogurt and enough of the reserved cooking water to make potatoes smooth and fluffy.
Beat in the remaining salt, pepper and nutmeg. If you wish to make the potatoes warm for serving, cook them over low heat, stirring occasionally, until they’re nice and hot. Serve with butter.
