Turkey and Spinach Loaf

I recently found out that I received a scholarship to go to France to take a language class and do research for my dissertation, so I'm not exactly sure what will happen with my blog while I'm there.  I may take a break from posting in July because of my trip -- but I might try to write the posts in advance and schedule them to post every two weeks because I recently discovered that blogger has that feature. The only reason I worry about taking a break is because I have such a back log of posts to make and it's really difficult to post about recipes that you made almost a year ago.  I do note in my cookbooks whether or not we liked the recipe and any tips I would want to remind myself abotu if/when I make it again, but as you've seen in my recent posts, I don't always remember how many servings we got out of it.  Also, in the case of the post I'm making for today, I had to look through all of my cookbooks until I finally figured out what the name of the recipe was that I had pictures for.

So, I made this recipe, the Turkey and Spinach Loaf, last August 4. (Part of the reason I couldn't find it is because I kept looking for "meatloaf" in the index of each book and it's not called a meatloaf even though that's exactly what it is.) This is from the Italian Slow Cooker cookbook and it's actually the first recipe that I made out of that cookbook.  And I know that because I just went through and re-tagged all of my posts based on what cookbook I got them out of, so if you want to read all of my reviews from one cookbook, you can now do that.

This recipe asks for either fresh or frozen spinach. In both cases you have to cook the spinach before you start, and I found it easy to use frozen and just cook it in the microwave. The recipe says that you should add salt, but I left that out.  The spinach is supposed to be chopped finely after you cook and drain it. Another benefit in this case to using frozen spinach is that you can get it already chopped.  So using frozen spinach cuts off time in both the cooking and the chopping, which is especially good for the busy grad student.

Then you take some Italian bread and soak it in water until it is soft and you can easily crumble it into a bowl.  You add chopped mushrooms, pancetta, and garlic and freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, as you can see in the image above.

You also add ground turkey, spinach, eggs, nutmeg, salt, and pepper.  I did not add the salt.  Then you moisten your hands and mix everything together.  Watch out -- the mixing will make your hands quite cold if you just took the turkey out of the fridge!

This recipe also calls for you to make the foil cradle, like I did before with the salsa meatloaf (and as you can see in the picture below). Unlike the salsa meatloaf, however, this recipe also calls for the meatloaf to be cooked in chicken broth.  Now, when I went shopping for this recipe, I saw that I had enough leftover chicken broth in the freezer, so I didn't bother buying any.  Of course, I completely forgot to take the broth out of the freezer in advance so I had to melt it in the microwave, as you can see from the image to the right.  So, after mixing everything together, you shape the mixture into a loaf in the crock pot and add the chicken broth and chopped fresh or canned tomatoes. (I used canned tomatoes.)

The image to the left is what the meatloaf looks like before it is cooked on low for 3 hours.  Now, generally I trust these cookbooks, but I was really paranoid about the meat not being completely cooked after only 3 hours so I left it on longer than that.

The image to the right shows you what the meatloaf looked like after I took it out of the crock pot.  The cookbook recommends that you serve it with mashed potatoes with a little olive oil and I think that would be very delicious, but we just served it with some frozen mixed veggies that we had in the freezer, as you can see from the image below. I really liked this meatloaf.  The only complaint I have was that it all came out a little too mushy.  The recipe calls for a 1/2 cup chicken broth and some liquid was also added with the canned tomatoes.  I think if I were to make this again I would add less liquid in hopes that would make the loaf more solid (and in that way, easier to take out of the crock pot and serve).

Now this is a healthy meatloaf.  Using the 8 servings that the cookbook says you'll get, it's only 279 calories per slice. Even if you added a generous serving of the garlic mashed potatoes that I made with the Swiss steak, you'd still end up under 500 calories.   And obviously you could get more servings out of this depending on how thick you slice it. In terms of cost, this is stipend-friendly as well.  As I cooked it, I only paid $2.58 per serving.  If you had to buy everything, it'd be a little bit more, but not much: $3.31 per serving.  If you're trying to be healthy, I really recommend this as an alternative to beef meatloaf.

Salsa Meat Loaf

Most people think first of soups and stews when they think of slow cooking, but your crock pot is also a good way to make meat loaf!  As you may recall, I posted a recipe previously about meat loaf (Meat Loaf on a Bed of Potatoes) and said that one of the major difficulties was in trying to get the meat loaf out of the crock pot.  Well, I tried meat loaf again not long after I moved into my new apartment, back on June 28 of last year, and did much better.  The key is making a foil cradle (like in the picture to the left), which you will use later to take the meat loaf out.

I got this recipe, for Salsa Meat Loaf from the Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook, the same one I got the previous meat loaf recipe from.  Interestingly, when looking for where I had found this recipe originally, I looked in several of my cookbooks and not a single other cookbook that I own has a meat loaf recipe in it, while this one has five in the "Beef, Veal, and Venison" chapter and another one, made with ground turkey, in the "Poultry, Game Birds, and Rabbit" chapter.

To make the meatloaf, you mix together ground beef, an egg, oats, salsa, red onion, marjoram or oregano, cumin, salt, and pepper.  I'm pretty sure that I used oregano because that's what I had already.  And as most people know who are regular readers of this blog, I left out the salt.  Then you place it into the crock pot in one big lump, before shaping it out into a loaf shape that fills the entire bottom of the crock pot, as you can see in the image to the left.  Then it cooks on low for about 6 hours.  The cookbook says to cook it until "an instant-read thermometer inserted in the center of the meat loaf registers at least 160° to 165°F" so this would be a great recipe to do with my new crock pot which has the cook by temperature option, but as you can see, I made this recipe before I had that one so I don't know how well that would work.

Now, toward the end of the cooking time, about 30 minutes according to the cookbook, you mix some more salsa with some olive oil and then spread it over the meat loaf.  Now, this probably wouldn't work if you went the temperature route so you could also just wait until it was done cooking and then spread the salsa mixture on the meat loaf.  Regardless, you should cook it for another 30 minutes on low after adding the salsa mixture.

Now, the taking the meat loaf out of the crock pot process is really a two-person job, but with the foil cradle it is much easier than it was to take the meat loaf out in the first meat loaf recipe that I tried.  In this case, you use the foil strips and handles to get the meat loaf out of the crock pot in one piece.  Now, the cookbook says that you should slide out the foil strips and throw them away, but I find when you first take it out of the crock pot, the meat loaf is too soft to do that.  I just ended up serving it as it was and then taking away the strips when I was packing up the leftovers.

The good thing about my previous attempt at meat loaf was that it cooked over potatoes so you just needed to add a vegetable and/or a salad to have a complete balanced meal.  In this case, I didn't have that option, so I made baked sweet potatoes in the second crock pot I have (the dual one, but I only used one side in this case).  It seems a little ridiculous, of course, to make baked potatoes in the crock pot because they take 6 to 9 hours on low to cook and in the oven they'd only take about an hour.  However, I often think that I'd like to have a baked potato with dinner, but I tend to work up until dinner and by the time I get around to cooking at all, I'm really hungry and so I just go with something that is quicker.  So the crock pot baked potatoes are really good to start in the morning and then by the time you're ready to eat, they're already done!

It's also really quick and easy (as are normal baked potatoes too, I guess).  You just wash the potatoes, stab them a few times, wrap them in foil, and throw them in the crock pot.  In this case, I actually prepared and started the potatoes first because they take longer and then started making the meat loaf. When it was time to eat, I made some broccoli to go on the side (I suspect this was cooked from frozen because I don't have fresh broccoli listed on my receipt for the shopping trip prior to making this) and dinner was served!  The meat loaf was good too!  Not like the meat loaf like my mom used to make, but the salsa is a nice touch!

Now, in terms of all my calculations, here's the thing: I have no idea how many servings we got out of this.  The cookbook says 6 to 8 but this is another case where it all depends on how thick you slice it.  So, for sake of calculations, I'm going to assume that we got 8 servings out of it because I know that I tend to serve thinner slices.  In that case, the meatloaf alone only comes out to about 243 calories per serving.  The broccoli and the sweet potato are only about 115 calories total, so the whole meal is only about 358 calories.  So if you're like my husband, you may want to have more than one slice of the meatloaf, making it up to 601 calories.  In terms of cost, this is a little bit pricey (well, in comparison to other crock pot meals I've made, not in comparison to eating out) if you needed to purchase all the ingredients.  I calculated it at about $5.15 per serving if you needed to purchase everything, including the sides (it's $4.63 for the meatloaf alone).  Of course, I had almost everything (includin g the sides) so it was only $1.83 per serving -- really good on my grad student budget.

Meat Loaf on a Bed of Potatoes

On June 14, in between my summer travels, I made meat loaf in the crock pot.  Basically, I came back from spending time at home after my best friend's wedding, and realized that the bag of potatoes I had purchased before I left was starting to sprout.  Since I was going to be leaving in another week for the ordination of some of my friends from my M.A. program, I began searching my crock pot cookbooks for a recipe with which I could use up the potatoes, and I quickly found one in my other favorite crock pot cookbook: Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Cookbook.  This cookbook definitely has some more interesting recipes than the one I used in my previous posts, but I don't use it as frequently because often the recipes are more complicated: you cannot just throw the ingredients in when you wake up in the morning, turn it on before going to school, and then have dinner when you get home.  Also, there are no pictures.  :)

The cool thing about this about this recipe is that you're cooking your main dish and a side at the same time in the same crock pot (of course, I still covet this one... and apparently there's one where you can do three recipes at a time as well).  The recipe calls for you to use olive oil to grease the bottom of the crock pot--I used nonstick cooking spray.  Then you just fill the bottom, neatly, with the peeled and cut potatoes.

You make the meatloaf in the same way that you'd normally make meatloaf.  Now, this recipe is not the way that I'd normally make meatloaf, and I did adjust the recipe a bit.  It's possible that some of the problems I had with serving the meatloaf (see the end of the post) would have been taken care of in the original recipe, but I cannot say that for sure.

The recipe is basically just ground beef, eggs, some form of bread crumbs (the recipe called for saltine crackers, I used bread, as you can see in the image above), ketchup, salt, and pepper.  Normally I don't add salt to my recipes, but I did this time.  You just mix all the ingredients together with your hands, then form it into a loaf in the shape of your crock pot, before placing it over the potatoes.

The recipe also calls for a topping, something that I normally don't do with my meatloaf either (I generally make meatloaf the way my mother did: ground beef or turkey, egg, bread, and onion).  The topping is only ketchup, light brown sugar, and Dijon mustard mixed together.  I was interested to see how it would end up making the meatloaf taste, because I don't usually think of sugar in my meatloaf.

Of course, when you mix it all together, it really just looks like ketchup.  You place the topping on top of the meatloaf and then, to illustrate my previous complaint about this cookbook, you have to cook it on high for one hour before switching it to low for another 6-7 hours.  What I did to make this before heading off to school was that I got up and the first thing I did was make the meatloaf and turn the crock pot to high.  Then, I was able to shower and get dressed and switch the temperature to low before heading off to school.

This is what the meatloaf looked like when I first turned it on.

And this is how it appeared after cooking for eight hours.

Now, the difficulty with the meatloaf came when I tried to take it out.  When I make meatloaf in the oven, using my mother's recipe, the meatloaf is relatively solid and can be sliced easily.  Trying to get the meatloaf out of the crock pot with this recipe was much more difficult.  It was soft and, as you can see from the picture on the right, no matter how much I tried, and even with the help of my roommate, I could not get the meatloaf to come out in one piece.

The cool thing about this recipe, however, was that I already had most of the ingredients: I was trying to use up the potatoes, and I had eggs, bread, ketchup, salt, pepper, brown sugar, and mustard already too (as those items are generally staples of any kitchen).  Thus, the only cost for the meals that I ate all that week was the ground beef.  I splurged to be sure to get the extra lean and paid $9.47 for approximately 2 lbs.  Even if I had needed to purchase the potatoes and had chosen to buy saltines, the total cost for this recipe was under $15.  The recipe says that it serves 6 to 8... I shared it with my roommate the first day (and had seconds because I was hungry) and had it four more times after that, so I got seven meals out of this (that's less than $2.25 per meal, not counting that I made a salad for myself each time too).  The meal is actually only about 400 calories per serving too.

However, I wasn't a big fan of this meatloaf recipe.  I like the idea of doing meatloaf over a bed of potatoes, and the potatoes were yummy.  This meatloaf was too mushy and too sweet for my taste.  Were I to make this recipe again, I'd just follow the meatloaf + potatoes idea, but use a different recipe (my mothers, perhaps?) for the meatloaf.