Back in the 1970’s, pita bread kind of appeared in West Coast restaurants. In fact, back then you couldn’t buy pita bread anywhere, but some restaurants did serve it. They didn’t sell the bread. So Sunset magazine did an article about it, with a recipe. Since I was a bread maker anyway, making pita didn’t intimidate me at all, and in fact I made them many times, back then. But I will admit, I had trouble with the bread opening up evenly – some parts would stick a bit. And if you couldn’t stuff the bread, well, what else could you do with them? So I had some waste.

It wasn’t long, though, before the grocery stores started carrying pita. And now we can buy whole wheat pita as well as regular. Even some flavored types on occasion as well.

Vividly I can remember, like Marcel Proust and his madeleines, the first lamb pita sandwich I had. It was a potluck at someone else’s home, and a couple I didn’t know brought lamb meatball pita sandwiches with a dark brown, rich, wine gravy to go with it. Oh my. It was so out of this world. Unfortunately for me, the guy was a chef, owned a restaurant (which I didn’t know), and was moderately offended when I asked if he’d share the recipe.

Ever since that day I’ve tried to find a recipe that would try to recreate that dish. I have tried lamb meatballs, attempted after the above incident, to figure out how to make them, and the sauce. Now I suspect it was probably an intense veal and red-wine stock that enriched the gravy.

So way back in 1973 I saw a steak pita sandwich recipe in Better Homes & Gardens (the magazine). Over the years I’ve changed it a little bit to try to make it as close to that meatball recipe as I could (but using steak instead of lamb). Marinating the sirloin steak (or a lamb steak) in a red wine-garlic-oregano mixture helps. Then you pan-fry the steak with the red onion until it’s barely done. Ahead of time you will have prepared the condiments (chopped tomato, lettuce, cucumber, and mixed the yogurt-sour cream sauce which contains some minced up green onions). Heat the pita if you’d like, but whenever I make this, the bread is back to room temp by the time you doctor up your pita with all the toppings and are ready to take your first bite.

This particular time I made it, I had some leftover rib eye steak. The steak was quite rare to start with, so I marinated the meat in the red wine-garlic mixture just as above, but when I sautéed it in the frying pan, I just barely cooked it, so the meat was warmed through, but still slightly pink when it was served. You could easily adapt this with leftover roast beef or roast lamb – just slice really thin pieces and marinate it in some red wine to give it moisture and heat it through. The original recipe didn’t serve cheese with it, but I have on occasion done so, but a typical Greek style would be crumbled Feta as another condiment, which I’ve also done, so that’s added into the recipe too. Feta may be Greek, but it might not be typical for this sandwich. I just like the texture and saltiness added to the combination.
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I don’t know about you, but I’ve always loved short ribs. My mother used to prepare them with some frequency, because our family all liked them. I don’t remember now how my mother prepared them. Over the years I’ve made them in numerous ways myself, but this recipe (new to me, but probably an old rendition) is so awesome. So perfect for this cut of meat.

Over the last few days I’ve mentioned a cooking class I attended last week about comfort food. Well, this recipe is the all-star winner in that category. The chef who prepared this, Deb Buzar, credited her mother-in-law for this recipe. As a professional chef, Deb said she tried countless versions of short ribs, but every time she kept going back to her mother-in-law’s recipe, and finally decided this is her favorite. She no longer even looks at other recipes. She said the sauce “made” the dish, and I wholeheartedly agree. You do want to serve this with a carb that will take the sauce, though – like mashed potatoes – she served it with the Mashed Potatoes with Caramelized Shallots and Truffle Oil that I posted recently. You could use rice, but mashed potatoes are just the perfect side for these.

The chef started off the class by laughing, saying “bet you thought I was crazy to choose short ribs to make for a 2+ hour cooking class.” Then she slid a pressure cooker over for us to see. She’d brought her own – a 10-quart Fagor she uses annually for canning and in between for lots of other things too. She loves her pressure cooker and uses it very often.

The cooked short ribs set aside while I whizzed up the sauce.

I don’t own one anymore. I was given one back in the 1960’s as a wedding gift. I did use it for some years until I burned the bottom of it when I dashed outside for some reason and left artichokes cooking away in it. An hour later the artichokes of course, were burned to a crisp inside and the pan had bowed such that it was no longer usable. I felt very guilty about that and kept the darned pan for years hoping somebody could figure out how to fix it. Nope. Nada. Finally tossed it out about 15 years ago. Meanwhile, some cookware manufacturers have come out with new versions. They work infinitely better than the older variety with the rocking gadget on the top. Now there are electric models too, but from reading reviews about them I’d say the stovetop ones appear to have more control. At least for now they do. The chef and the store owner both recommended the Fagor brand (made in Spain) as the best. Later note: I’ve since bought a pressure cooker, and use it frequently!

All the sauce gets whizzed up – if you have time, chill the stuff overnight and remove the fat – otherwise it gets homogenized into the sauce.

The sauce is so very easy – chopped celery and onion (raw) combined with water, white vinegar, ketchup, sugar, salt, Worcestershire sauce and dry mustard. You brown the chunks of boneless short ribs (silverskin removed and cut into large 2-inch pieces) on two sides, then combine the sauce and meat. If you have a pressure cooker, it takes 28 minutes to process. If you bake it in a 350 F. oven, it takes about 2 hours, maybe 2 ¼ hours. It can also be done in a crock pot for about 8-10 hours too.

The calories and fat on this recipe are outrageous. I’d forgotten how bad this meat is for us. Short ribs are just riddled with fat. They used to be a cheap cut of meat. Not so much anymore. I purchased the boneless ones at Costco. The chef recommended this be made a day or two ahead, refrigerated, then you can remove the fat from the top of the sauce. It’s so gosh-darned good. And yes, more comfort food at its finest. Technically this should serve 8 people. But if they’re hungry and they like this, well, 4 pounds of meat won’t feed more than 6.
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Over the years since the tri-tip roast became more visible at the butcher shop (or at Costco), I’d not been bitten by the bug. Lots of people raved about it. I wasn’t convinced. Yes, I had some here and there when someone else made it. After all, it looks like a fillet mignon. It just doesn’t taste like one, and it certainly doesn’t chew like one. But I read an article recently for tri-tip, extolling its virtues. So, when I visited my local, favorite butcher and they had Niman Ranch tri-tips, rib eyes and porterhouses, I figured if Niman Ranch was producing them, and if my butcher was showcasing the tri-tips with its very uptown relatives, then maybe they were worth reconsidering.

If you’ve never been much of a tri-tip fan, I won’t be convincing you otherwise. I don’t really think I am, either. This recipe doesn’t make tri-tip taste or chew any better than a fairly chewy piece of meat. But if you enjoy a bit of chew, this preparation may be just down your alley.

Tri-tip is a cut of meat that comes from the bottom sirloin. If you’ve ever had a sirloin from the bottom end and noticed that it was a lot more chewy and less tender, well, this is cut from that end. There are only two of them on every animal, so that’s why we don’t see them all that often. They’re very lean, I’ll give them that. Although there are some sinews and a bit of gristle, there’s really very little. So, if you’re going to eat red meat, this is fairly healthy. It needs marinating to give it more flavor, and to tenderize it. At least 24 hours worth.

The recipe comes from Bon Appetit, June, 2002. My DH enjoyed the flavor. My opinion? Eh. It’s not the preparation I didn’t like; it’s the cut of meat. If you go onto epicurious for this recipe, there are countless reviews of it. Some loved it. Others didn’t. Most people raved about the relish. I didn’t make the relish because I still had some mango-strawberry salsa I made the other night. But I think the cherry tomato relish would be a much better complement to the beef than the salsa. The marinade has a more savory taste, and a sweet salsa doesn’t go. It just doesn’t. But, no matter what, you can’t change the taste or the chew of the meat. So, knowing all that, you can decide whether you’d like to try this.

I don’t usually post recipes here that I don’t just love, but since I thought maybe other people would like the meat better than I did, I’m posting it anyway.
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It seems like it’s only been in the last year or so that I’ve become enamored with preparing beef tenderloin for guests. Probably my reluctance in years past was that I truly didn’t know how to roast it. More specifically, I didn’t know how to prepare it perfectly. Then, of course, there’s the cost factor. It is one of the most expensive cuts of meat out there. I wasn’t about to invest in a $50 roast to serve an overcooked, tough, or dry piece of meat to guests.

My mother, bless her heart, a product of the depression, probably never, EVER purchased or roasted a tenderloin. Growing up, even when we went out to dinner I wasn’t allowed to order steak (too expensive). For many years my mother and I shared a meal, even when we went out, in order to save money. I so well remember when I was about 17 or 18, I finally asked my mother if I could have my very OWN steak, on those occasions when she’d buy T-bones to grill at home.

Mostly, though, my mother would buy a rump roast and bake that for guests. With no sauce. It had nothing to elevate it to something edible, in my book. Rump roasts are one of those that need dry heat, but when you’re done, it’s nothing but a very dry piece of meat. And not all that tender, either. I would venture to guess that I may have made a rump roast once in my complete adult life. It was just as I’d remembered. Dry, tough, like shoe leather.

I believe I ate chateaubriand for the first time when I was in my mid-20’s. I thought it was heavenly, but it was never in the budget to buy it to prepare at home, and here I am in my 60’s and it’s still elusive, a bit.

But, this last week I was served a beef tenderloin that came from a regular grocery store. I was positively amazed how tender and delicious it was. Usually when I buy meat – especially for a company dinner – I go to a meat market, or an upscale grocery store, and will pay top dollar. It’s possible this particular roast from a grocery store was a fluke, but I’m going to have to try them and see if it’s their normal quality. (It happened to have been Albertson’s, in case anyone is interested.)

As I’ve mentioned before in my blog, I’m in love with meat thermometers – the newer kinds that measure both oven and meat temps. I can rely on it telling me when the meat has just reached the right temp.

Now let’s get to the recipe. This roast is seasoned, browned, then crusted with a pile of fresh herbs before baking in the oven. You use the same saute pan to prepare the cabernet wine sauce. Then you make a horseradish cream sauce too. The meat needs to rest a bit before you slice it up to serve, so there’s plenty of time to prepare the wine sauce and the horseradish cream. That’s it. It was just scrumptious. Certainly not low in calorie, however. But if you’d like a foolproof recipe for tenderloin, this is it.
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When I saw this recipe I was very skeptical. Beef stew with currant jelly? And cream in the sauce? But Cherrie, my friend, had just raved about this dish, said she and her husband both craved seconds, and leftovers. So finally, I got around to trying it. And yes indeed, it is very good.

Apparently it’s a Wolfgang Puck recipe. And if you’re not of the school that likes all those soft, soggy vegetables that usually accompany stew, then this version will float your boat. There are no carrots sticks or celery pieces, nor potato cubes either. There is, however, a mirapoix (that’s French for the mixture of finely minced onions, celery and carrots) that’s part of the flavoring agents used in much of French cooking. And, it happens, that Trader Joe’s (at least in our area) is now selling a quart container of fresh mirapoix. That’s what I used for this, and it made the prep work on it so very easy. In this case, the beef stew meat is marinated in wine and herbs (overnight, preferably), then you quickly sear the beef and mirepoix in some oil to bring out that wonderful fond flavor (the brown stuff that sticks to the bottom of the pan). Then you add a bit of flour to help thicken the sauce, and add broth and the marinade before simmering for a couple of hours.

Since this didn’t have any veggies, to speak of, I should have added some mushrooms. I think they would have made a nice addition. And I served it on a bed of linguine. Probably not traditional, but was very good with the wine gravy. This recipe is a keeper.
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There are years when I don’t do anything special for St. Patrick’s Day. I may not even wear green. Even though part of my genealogy is Irish. I certainly wouldn’t ever drink green beer, but then I’m not a beer drinker anyway. What tilted me over the edge this time was seeing a Niman Ranch corned beef round at Trader Joe’s. You’ve heard it from me before, Niman Ranch makes some mighty fine meat products. The corned beef I bought was called a “corned beef round,” so I’d guess it was a slightly different cut. It had absolutely NO fat on it at all, and cost me about $14.00 for 5 pounds.

I also knew exactly what recipe I would make, too. My friend Linda T, a very good cook, has told me about her recipe for a couple of years, and I’ve been meaning to make this, so it was time.

The ingredients in this version aren’t all that different, but the cooking method IS a bit unusual: you simmer (always below a boil) the corned beef for 3 ½ to 4 hours, then cool the meat in the water until it reaches nearly room temp. (My guess is that time allows time for the meat to reabsorb some of the liquid it lost during the long slow simmering time). You remove the meat, spread it with a glaze and bake it for about 45 minutes before serving with vegetables you simmered in the cooking water from the beef. So you need to plan ahead with this – it’s not that it takes much hands-on time (it doesn’t), but you need to watch over the pot on the stove so it doesn’t boil (a very important aspect of this dish). It’s like braising – long, slow cooking at just under a boil. Keeps the meat more moist and succulent.

I wasn’t totally successful keeping the pot below a boil – I needed to run a couple of errands, and left the pot on the stove during that time. When I got back and lifted the lid, it was bubbling away. Perhaps a safer method would be to put the corned beef in a crock pot and pour boiling water over it, add the pickling spices and turn it to low right then and there. I’m not certain what temperature a crock pot on low is, but the beef might need a few more hours of that slow cooking than normal. With my crock pot (which is very old) on high it is boiling. I should measure the temp of the food one of these times when I use it.

If you use regular potatoes, just cut them into 4-6 pieces so everything will be done at about the same time. My favorite part of the vegetables is always the cabbage, especially simmered in that flavorful water. All the vegetables were done at the same time (I used fairly small carrots – if larger, you might want to give them an extra 5-10 minutes before you add all the other veggies).

The beef was moist and juicy. Easy to slice into thin pieces. The flavor? Outstanding. I’d make this again soon. If I could get more of Trader Joe’s corned beef, that is. I’ll have to look and see if they still have some and I might just buy one to make in a few weeks.

Cook’s Notes: remember to keep the corned beef below a boil during the 3-4 hours of simmering. Time the vegetables so they’re just done when the corned beef comes out of the oven. And save the cooking liquid – you use it for the veggies.
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Certainly you’ve had Beef Wellington at some time in your life, haven’t you? I’ve even made it a couple of times in individual servings. Very good. This recipe is kind of like a Beef Wellington except the beef is already cut into cubes, and it’s combined with a mushroom sauce inside, then served with a wonderful spicy horseradish sauce on the side. The recipe is Phillis Carey’s, from a recent cooking class. The subject of the class was “entertaining entrees.” And yes, they were. Are. For entertaining. Two other recipes from the class I probably won’t make (a pork tenderloin with port fig sauce and a chicken breast stuffed with spinach) as they weren’t very “wow,” in my book, anyway. If the recipes don’t wow me, I don’t even enter them into my recipe software program. But the orange roughy with leek sauce and this one I entered immediately.

The best thing about this beef tenderloin in puff pastry is that you can make it up ahead – like a week or so and freeze it (and bake it 10 minutes longer) – or you can make it up to 4 hours ahead and keep refrigerated until you’re ready to bake for your guests. I like those kinds of options when I’m entertaining.

The origin of the horseradish chive sauce is interesting. Phillis loves the jar of similar sauce made by Rothschild, and she looked at the ingredients on the jar and created a sauce very, very similar to it. Certainly cheaper. And really quite easy. She combines sour cream, mayo, chili sauce (not the hot type, more like a thick spicy catsup), garlic, horseradish and chives. Everybody in the class was “mmmm“-ing while we ate it. I made these for a dinner party last weekend. Got lots of ahhhs. And I promised to post the recipe for our guests so they can make this themselves.

The beef: gorgeous tender tips of fillet mignon briefly browned; a sauce with mushrooms, onion, garlic, dry sherry, broth; puff pastry cut into quarters and rolled out to a larger square. Beef and sauce in the center, pastry edges brushed with egg then pressed together into a kind of envelope. Then it’s baked in a hot oven. Have your dinner all ready during the last 5 minutes of baking – maybe even get your guests seated at the table. Whisk out the pastries and serve them immediately.

I did learn something in making these myself . . . I had a box of puff pastry in my freezer already. I also bought another one, because we had 9 people for the dinner party. I hadn’t looked at the dates on either package, but the newer purchased one was actually older than the one I had in my freezer. I could tell the difference. Some of the dough stuck to itself. I managed, but it was a little bit difficult. So, my advice is to buy fresh (well, it’s frozen) puff pastry and don’t keep it long. I also didn’t buy the recent package at a regular grocery, but an independent market, so it had been there in their freezer for nearly a year. The more recently frozen the puff pastry, the more likely it will be easier to roll out and manipulate.

Just be sure to defrost the puff pastry a day ahead – in the refrigerator. Don’t just set the box on the kitchen counter, or the pastry sheets will stick to themselves. The beef cubes need to be ever-so-quickly browned. That’s it. Just browned. They need to be still very, very red inside since they bake for an additional 15 minutes, and you’d like the meat to still retain a bit of pink. If you freeze the pastries, they are baked differently – don’t defrost them. Bake from a frozen state, at 400 for 25 minutes. And I’m being repetitive here, but serve them immediately. No dilly-dallying even 5 minutes.
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Seared steak salad – with some goat cheese, tomatoes, and delicious roasted onions. Then there’s some chipotle mayo drizzled on top of the steak.

I never think to make a steak salad. It always seems to me that if I’m going to grill a nice steak, I really want to eat it straight away, its own chunk of beefy goodness. With maybe a veggie, or if I’m feeling particularly weak willed, some potatoes on the side.

But I had this ONE steak in the freezer. Lonely steak. Small steak, albeit a ribeye. What could I do with it, to extend it to feed two? I breezed through my recipes and came across this one that I hadn’t made in a couple of years. My recollection was that it was very good. And yes, it was.

Don’t get overwhelmed by the list of ingredients. It’s really not that involved, even though it may look like it. There’s a rub/marinade for the steak. There are onions that get marinated and baked in a blisteringly hot oven. There’s a salad, with an easy oil and balsamic dressing, the specific salad greens and the different decorations to go along with everything, AND there’s a very easy chipotle mayo that gets dribbled on the top. See, not so awfully hard, is it?

It does take a bit of time to assemble everything, I admit, but it is worth the effort.
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Probably 30 years ago I saved a recipe for Bobotie, after reading it in some magazine. It sounded so unusual – a ground meat dish (a casserole, actually, like a meatloaf) with some raisins and almonds, plus some curry powder, then topped with a kind of eggy custard. I’d never made it. Until the other night. I’ve had it served to me – some friends of ours are from South Africa – and they entertained us one night and served their version. This has been a couple of years ago, but I believe it was served with rice, chutney and some other condiments. I really enjoyed it. This version resembles a recipe I found in Gourmet, but I made several changes based on the other recipes I had to refer to.I knew it was an African-historied dish, but here’s more, from Wikipedia:
Bobotie is a South African dish consisting of spiced minced meat baked with an egg-based topping. The recipe probably originates from the Dutch East India Company colonies in Batavia, with the name derived from the Indonesian Bobotok. It is also made with curry powder leaving it with a slight “tang”.

It is a dish of some antiquity: it has certainly been known in the Cape of Good Hope since the 17th century, when it was made with a mixture of mutton and pork. Today it is much more likely to be made with beef or lamb, although pork lends the dish extra moistness. Early recipes incorporated ginger, marjoram and lemon rind; the introduction of curry powder has simplified the recipe somewhat but the basic concept remains the same. Some recipes also call for chopped onions to be added to the mixture. Traditionally, bobotie incorporates dried fruit like raisins or sultanas, but the sweetness that they lend is not to everybody’s taste. It is often garnished with walnuts, chutney and bananas.

Cook’s Notes: If you enjoy curry, you might want to add more. Be sure to serve this with rice (it’s customary) and some condiments, preferably some chutney. The apple isn’t always included – your choice. Make certain the onion and apple are minced up finely so the meatloaf will be cohesive. The lemon leaves are not a requirement, but they must be traditional in South Africa. I didn’t have any bananas, but they appear in several recipes for Bobotie.
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When my DH was still working – this has been more than 10+ years ago now – Fay was one of the women who worked in the office (DH sold computer chips for Intel). She lived on the outskirts of our county on a small ranch. Her children were young teens then, and the family was active in 4-H. The H’s stand for Head, Heart, Hand, and Health. It’s a youth organization, centered mostly around farming or ranching families, along the lines of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, except the kids learn skills for raising livestock (like cows, sheep, chickens, etc.). They do service projects just like scouting does, but still the day to day work is all about farm projects.

Fay had a son who wanted to raise a pig. And usually, the deal is that the kids raise the animals, knowing from the beginning that they’ll be sold at the County Fair. Or at a livestock auction. So Fay offhandedly mentioned to DH that her boys were going to be selling a pig – their pig – at the Fair that summer. She also told us that we’d be paying a fairly premium price for the pig, but would we be interested in buying a half or a whole pig? She explained that the pig was mostly hand raised, and that part of the price is tax deductible somehow. Her son would be caring for it from day one on their ranch, the best feed, exercised well, pens cleaned out, etc. We talked it over, and Cherrie and I agreed to buy a half a pig. Fay would buy the other half. We signed up to buy it in the Fall when the pig was a little piglet. Months and months went by, and I’d forgotten all about this until one day Fay phoned to tell us that the pig was going to the Fair the next day. Oops. And that we would need to pay up in full right away. That’s when we learned how BIG the pig was. Something like 400+ pounds. Somehow I’d pictured a sweet little, demure thing, maybe 100 pounds or so. Ah well. Live and learn. Pigs are not hogs, but they’re gosh darned BIG.

The next day Fay phoned with the price and Cherrie and I mailed our checks immediately. Meanwhile, we needed to decide how we’d like to have the pig butchered – well, not how exactly, but what kind of cuts. We were faxed a page from the butchering firm, and we looked it over carefully to decide on chops, ribs, roasts, breakfast sausage, Italian seasoned sausage, plain ground pork, even hams smoked or raw, and bacon. We needed to specify how much of each. Of course, some things we didn’t know – like how many pounds of baby backs there are in a half a pig. It was quite perplexing figuring that out. We faxed back the page, and they told us to come pick it up a few days hence, depending on the smoke house schedule. The 4-H group used a company almost in Northwest Riverside (that’s about 50 miles away), out in the boonies, to do the butchering.

THEN, we got a note from Fay’s son, including the tax deduction information, and he thanked us for buying PETUNIA. Oh my. Petunia. When we heard her name was Petunia, we wanted to back out. To say no, you can’t have butchered Petunia! How could we possible buy a slaughtered pig with the name of Petunia? Sounds inhuman. Like you’re destroying a famous cartoon character. But we had to – after all, we’d agreed to do this and we’d already paid for it. It was too late, of course.

For several years we bought an animal from Fay’s son and one of us had to drive out to this butcher, with the car filled with ice chests. It was always summertime, so we needed to keep the stuff cold. They did freeze all the meat for us – that is a nice service – and it was all labeled well. Cherrie and I figured out which was which – hers and mine – and we began enjoying the pig. PETUNIA. <very big, sad faces here> I think Petunia was the very best tasting pig we had. For a couple more years we shared another pig. Cherrie bought a half by herself one year. His name was Tootsie Roll. Fay’s sons also raised lambs a couple of times too. Generally, with whatever kind of meat, we used the nice cuts first, seemed like. The chops, the roasts. Even the Italian sausage. Unless we used the ham prior, for a special occasion, it usually waited until Easter to be served. Some years it was too salty for me, so in subsequent years I asked for less smoking, less salt, which the butcher was kind enough to accommodate.

So all of this story is leading up to how this recipe came to be. Cherrie had somehow, one year, ordered a LOT of ground pork. I mean a lot. We learned over the years what we preferred – the chops, roasts, even the ribs, not so much the hams or the numerous packages of seasoned sausage. We could order the ground pork in whatever sized package we wanted – I always ordered in one-pound ones. But they often got rolled to the back of the shelves (the freezer) and began to accumulate. There are only so many recipes you can use with pounds and pounds of ground pork. Unseasoned, fairly lean, but still, it’s ground pork. The only constant was meatloaf. But usually that’s a mixture of beef, veal and pork, or some semblance of such. Veal is not very accessible these days and way too pricey anyway, so basically you’re down to ground beef and ground pork (or you could add ground turkey or chicken too). So, really, how much pork can you use up in ONE meatloaf. Two pounds maybe. When you have perhaps 25 pounds of ground pork in the freezer, that’s a heck of a lot of meatloaf.

So, Cherrie raved about this recipe for Chinese Meatloaf, and she was delighted because the single recipe used a full pound of ground pork. She’d found the recipe in the Los Angeles Times (this has been years and years ago, now, and it’s not available online). She’s changed it just a bit, but mostly it’s the original recipe: ground beef, pork, a lot of Napa cabbage, cilantro, fresh ginger, Asian seasonings, and some Hoisin sauce on top. I’d gone online to see if I could find the recipe, and did, but mostly found recipes for a meatloaf using lots of cream soup cans and bean sprouts. Yuck. This version is ever so much more authentic and tasty.

Cook’s Notes: Cherrie has added another cup of Napa cabbage to her version (the one below), and she likes to put a bit of Hoisin on the top of the meatloaf when it first goes in the oven. Not much, but about 2 tablespoons. You’ll want to use a large baking dish, like an oval or round Pyrex. Mold the meatloaf into the dish so it has space around the sides to exude the juice. The meatloaf generates a lot of liquid, so make sure it’s high enough sided that it doesn’t spill over. Halfway through the baking, you’ll want to pour off the fat. I suspect a lot of the liquid is juice from all the cabbage, but still, you’d like it removed since the fat is swimming in that water anyway. Then when the meatloaf is done, smear the top with a bunch more Hoisin sauce, because that’s the part you crave (like the ketchup part on a traditional American meatloaf). The meatloaf makes a somewhat soft texture (from all the cabbage), so let it cool for a bit before slicing and serving. She serves it with basmati or jasmine rice in which she’s shaved some carrots, and a green salad to which she adds some kind of citrus, like Mandarin oranges from the can, or some wedges of fresh orange or tangerine. Thanks Cherrie, for sharing your great recipe.
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