Well, this isn’t really a recipe, since I don’t have any measurements, but sometimes a girl looks in the freezer, and feels a tiny flame of inspiration. So, here’s the deal — I had some ground lamb and ground antelope left over from last year. I took a pound of ground lamb, two packages of antelope (they didn’t have weights on them, I think they were about a half pound each) and two mild Italian sausages, and decided to make a meatloaf. I started by sauteeing two ribs of celery, a couple of carrots and a medium yellow onion with a little salt and a big sprinkle of red pepper flakes. In a big bowl, I crumbled up two slices of stale whole wheat bread, and added enough milk to moisten them. Then I smashed four or five cloves of garlic and threw them in the minichop with a bunch of fresh rosemary, lots of thyme and parsley, the zest from half a lemon, and a big pinch of coarse sea salt. I whizzed it all up with some olive oil to emulsify. I added the herb mixture to the wet bread, and, when they were soft, I mixed in the sauteed vegetables and one package of thawed chard I had in the fridge (chopped up fine). Like I said, it was one of those what’s-in-the-fridge kind of recipes. Then I added the meats, and two eggs, lightly beaten and a hefty sprinkling of oregano. I smushed the whole mess around until it was all mixed up, and packed the mixture into a greased loaf pan. There was about a third of the mixture left over, which I think I’ll use for meatballs or ravioli — it went back into the freezer. I cooked it at 375 for two hours — it was a big meatloaf so it took a long time.
It was great — it didn’t have that heavy meatloaf-y taste — all those vegetables I think. And it had a nice Greek-ish kind of taste from the lemon zest, oregano, and herbs. Antelope is a really lovely meat — it gets a bad reputation because the season is early, and too often people aren’t careful to get their game packed out in hot weather. But the antelope that Parks brought me last year was delightful — from a young animal, and while lean, and a dark red meat, has a nice clean light taste. I think a comparable mixture might be veal, lamb and a little ground pork.
Anyhow, now I have a whole meatloaf to cut into portions and freeze, a winter’s worth of easy re-heatable meals for those crummy evenings when a girl doesn’t feel like cooking. Yum.
That sounds delicious. In the summer, we often make a similar meat mixture (minus antelope!) and stuff it into hollowed-out tomatoes. A house favorite. . . . (and you can do it with supermarket tomatoes, once you’ve forgotten what the real ones taste like).
Doesn’t having good food in the freezer make you feel, somehow, safe?