Me vs. the meatloaf on the menu

I blame my mother, which of course is standard fare for all of us, especially women, to do. But Mother wasn't a cook. Nor was she a seamstress, both talents at which her mother excelled, therefore mine had nothing to do with either. (I have a theory that if your mother is good at something, you will not be. For example, Mother had a very green thumb, could merely look at a rose cutting and it would bloom while I must continually replant what has died under my watchful, how-much-is-too-much-water-challenged eyes.)

But back to the cooking. Mother had standard fare in the kitchen, most of which, spaghetti, something called "dinner in a dish", and an overly dry roast, we learned to live with. But her meatloaf was abysmal.

I would scrape the tomato topping off and eat it, then move the parcels of beef around on my plate, trying to hide them. Unlike the time when I was 6 or so and, left to my own devices at the kitchen table and I took my, to me, awful fried egg sandwich and stuck it in a thermos bottle where it languished for 6 months before being discovered and tossed (I was as surprised an anyone in the family to find such a mess in the thermos), unlike then, I was immediately found out for not eating the meatloaf. Very well, I could go hungry. Very well, I hardly thought of it that way. More like esophageal preservation. Even venturing to make it in my own kitchen with a reliable cookbook at hand had been a disastrous affair. I was meatloaf-impaired.

So yesterday when my husband and I pulled into the parking lot of our favorite after-church cafe, I was dismayed to find that along with stuffed fish and chicken and dumplings (not my fav either), there was meatloaf on the menu. Spouse is not a meatloaf fan either, but he had tried the cafe's offering and liked it and dared me to do so also.

Had the stuffed fish not been so good, I would have had to have two servings of the meatloaf. Who knew it could be so flavorful, that hidden underneath the tomato sauce was a well-balanced range of spices?

Hat in hand, so to speak, I found the owner/cook and confessed. I was a convert, but a cautious one. I'd never scorn her meatloaf and I swore to try little bites of anyone else's.

I just didn't promise to try and make it on my own,