Turkey Meatloaf with Onions and Herbs!

Sunday was my boyfriend’s birthday.  However, if you did check out my workout week 3 update, we had a very sick morning to start things off.  He started off feeling sick and skipping work while after tending to him, at noon, I didn’t feel so well either.  After that, things managed to taper off as the meds did their work and with some rest (for my boyfriend) and some busying and relaxing about (for me), I picked up my spirits and started cooking.  Although the original plans of making chicken pot pie was diminished, I used what we had at hand to make my first meatloaf ever! Keep in mind, I come from a Chinese family, eating meatloaf is not on the menu, rice is 😉

I made this turkey meatloaf with onions and herbs from the Looneyspoons Collection. I aim to cook through that book this year and I think its pretty doable.

Turkey Meatloaf

This is inspired of the recipe called Loafstyles of the Rich and Famous from Looneyspoons Collection by Janet and Greta Podelski. This is modified to how I did it since I made a bit of changes.

Ingredients

Makes 6 servings

3/4 cup chopped onions

1 1/2 lbs ground turkey

1/2 cup quick-cooking rolled oats

1/3 cup chicken broth

1/4 cup minced fresh shallots

1 egg

1 tsp Dijon mustard

1 tsp minced garlic

3/4 tsp dried Herbes de Provence

1/2 tsp each dried coriander, salt and freshly ground black pepper

Directions:

1) Preheat oven to 350F.

2) In a large bowl, mix together onions and all ingredients.

3) Spray a 9×5-inch loaf pan with cooking spray.  Pat turkey mixture into pan.  Bake for 1 hour, or until no longer pink in center.  Pour off any liquid from pan.  Invert onto a platter, slice and serve.

The original recipe is with apples.  To me, that seems a bit wacky, so I didn’t do it.  However, if you were to do that, you’d start it off with melting 2 tsp of butter in a non-stick skillet over medium heat .  Then you add apples and onions.  Cook and stir for about 5 minutes, until onion are tender and let it cool.

The other changes that I made are: replacing 1% milk with chicken broth; minced fresh parsley with shallots; dried marjoram with dried Herbes de Provence and finally dried sage with dried coriander.

The herbs make for a nice spice combination to the taste.  The turkey loaf is just moist enough and quite delicious.  The only thing I would change is to minced those onions a lot.  I was lazy and had a bit of time constraints so I did it as quick as I could, other than the fact that I was tearing up like made from chopping it.

Whats also really nice other than the taste and the texture if that its a healthier recipe and makes for a good and simple meal.  I think I’m starting to really like meatloaf and I’m going to explore a bit more into it.

What do you like in meatloaf? Would you think that the apples would’ve been a fun addition?

Sunday Baking:Coconut-Almond Bread!

Baking on Sundays is starting to become a routine.  This Sunday, I used baking to get rid of a terrible migraine.  You know what though, it worked (weird as it may sound).  I bought a new loaf pan as an addition to my bakeware so I’ve been wanting to try it out, just never figured out what type of bread to bake.  I flipped through recipe books and stuff but I was missing ingredients for everything so I just ended up winging it with a little inspiration from Looneyspoons Collection called “A Grateful Bread”.

“A Grateful Bread” is supposed to have grated apples and grated carrots and grated coconuts (aka coconut shreds) but I didn’t have any apples left at home.  I really didn’t think coconuts and carrots would’ve been a very awesome match without apples to balance things out.  Thats just a feeling I get, if you’ve done it and it turned out tasting good, I’d love to hear about it.

So with that being said, I changed some ingredients around and made a Coconut-Almond Bread instead.

Here’s the recipe (modified from original recipe in The Looneyspoons Collection by Janet & Greta Podleski):

COCONUT ALMOND BREAD

Makes 1 Loaf, 12 slices

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup quick-cooking rolled oats

1 cup granulated sugar

2 tsp baking powder

2 tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp ground nutmeg

1 cup sweetened shredded coconut

1/3 cup chopped almonds

1/2 cup water

2 eggs

2 tbsp vegetable oil

2 tsp vanilla

DIRECTIONS:

1. Preheat oven to 350F.  Spray a 9×5 inch loaf pan with cooking spray and set aside.

2. In a large bowl, combine flour, oats, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, salt and nutmeg.  Add coconut and almonds. Mix well.

3. In a medium bowl, whisk together water, eggs, oil and vanilla.

4.  Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients.  Mix just until dry ingredients are moistened.  Pour batter into pan.  Spread evenly.  Bake for 55 to 60 minutes, or until wooden pick inserted in center of loaf comes out clean.  Cool for 10 minutes in pan.  Remove bread from pan and let cool completely on a wire rack.  Cover with plastic wrap and store in the refrigerator.

I gave you the modified version as I had changed so many of the ingredients and eliminated.  The only issue I had was why the bread didn’t become fluffier.  I’m guessing its because I took away some of the other grated ingredients but didn’t change the quantity other than the chopped almonds and grated coconut.  All in all though, it did taste pretty good.  I might have changed the balance of the coconut shreds and chopped almonds.  This bread is perfect as a dessert as it has a nice sweet coconut taste.  On the other hand, the almonds helped it give it the chewy crunchy taste.

I’ll definitely be doing more bread! Hopefully next weekend I”ll do another one!

Any suggestions for what bread to make? Any suggestions to make it fluffier? Will you try this out?