Mom's Meat Loaf

My mother's meat loaf is always something I have enjoyed. When I was little my mom thought this was my favorite meal, so for my birthday each year, she made it. I honestly don't know what my favorite meal was, so this was a good choice.
I still use this recipe myself, and add different veggies to it. I like celery, green or red or yellow bell peppers in it. One time when I was out of oatmeal, I added some Special K cereal. I liked that so much that I have also tried All-Bran and my all time favorite Bran Buds. As you can see, you can add what you like. I will say that I do enjoy the tomato sauce the best over gravy or ketchup. But of course it is what you prefer.
This recipe my mom gave me years and years ago was just a list of the ingredients, not how much of each. So I was surprise to find on this recipe in her box that she does list how much of each spice goes to one pound of hamburger. Now-a-days I don't measure, I just add the spices until it smells right.

Ingredients:
one pound ground hamburger
1/2 cup oatmeal
1 egg
1 grated carrot, if small do two
1 small onion, diced and chopped
1 teaspoon chile powder
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground pepper
Put all of this in a bowl and mix it well. Make into a loaf and put on a special meat loaf pan with holes, or can put in a loaf pan. Bake at 400 degrees, although I do 350 degrees for about an hour.
(Note: if you do the little loaves, takes about 40-45 minutes.)

As I was making the meat loaf this evening, I decided to bake it in a little toaster/convection type oven, as not to overheat the house.

Here is a picture before putting in the oven, minus the sauce.
The first picture on top is of course with the tomato sauce poured on and then I put it in the oven. I usually make a big loaf and put it in a loaf pan and bake in the oven at 350 degrees for an hour. So as I found out today, it was nice to make smaller loaves, tasted just as good! That is a 9" round cake pan and yep that is the whole one pound, fits nicely.
Here is the final dish and I am ready to eat my dinner! I love the leftovers to make sandwiches, yum!

Un-named Recipe

Here is a recipe of my grandmother’s without a name, but it sounds like a stove top dish, so I will called it:

Granny’s Homemade Stop-top Dinner

2 pounds ground meat (I like hamburger, but I suppose you could use any type of ground meat)

1 can cream of mushroom soup (I used cream of celery soup)

1 can corn

1 can pitted olives, sliced

1 can tomato paste

1 Lipton onion soup

1 ¾ cup water (I added a total of 3 cups water, to make sure the noodles cooked all the way through.)

8 ounce package of egg noodles crushed

Cook meat until crumbles apart and red is gone. Put onion soup and water and cook a little while then mix all other ingredients into meat and bake about 45 minutes. Don’t precook noodles, just put them in.

*Note: even though it says bake, I am thinking you just cook this on the stove top, like you would hamburger helper type meal.

OMG!!! This really surprised me! It was really good and I can't wait to try adding my own veggies and cooking stove-top meals from scratch! I never knew how much tomato paste can thicken a sauce so quickly. Will be adding fresh or frozen vegetables to this recipe or not adding the noodles and trying rice. I think the basic sauce can go with many different dishes, even adding cooked chicken cubes or shredded instead of a ground meat. Anyway, it was delicious!!! Try it and let me know how you cook it up.