The mudroom and meatloaf

In our house we have what I like to call the mudroom.  It is actually a little hallway right inside the garage door.  It has backpack hooks and about a jillion coat hooks and baskets for shoes. A nice tidy little place for the children to store their things...yeah right.  Truth of the matter is that the children "store" their things wherever they cease to need them; causing me to have an unending instructional period on the advantages to the shoe baskets right inside the door.  I'm not sure why they cannot see the logic in the having shoes, coats and backpacks right there handy to grab on the way out the door, but the concept completely escapes them.  What they do like to store there for easy access is a bit different.  Only in the "mudroom" at our house would you find this.

Yes, that is what you think it is...an athletic cup.  Why someone would think that is an appropriate place to store that particular item is beyond me.  No one wanted to fess up to this but I know who had baseball practice yesterday, so it's pretty obvious.  When confronted the reply was my own words thrown right back at me, "It's the perfect place to keep something you are going to need when walking out the door."  Um, ok well tell me this, how many times are you going to need an athletic cup when walking out the door?  And, he's done.  Score one for the mom. ;)

Tonight we are having meatloaf.  There are only two things that really gross me out, a used athletic cup and raw meat. So I have searched long and hard for a recipe that doesn't require me to knead the meat into a loaf.  Here is the recipe:

Non Meat Touching Meatlaoaf (That's what I have named this recipe)

1lb of browned ground turkey.  Use can use beef but I use turkey because if I ate as much meat as these boys there wouldn't be enough treadmills in the world to fix my "problem areas."
1 cup milk
1 cup bread crumbs.  They actually sell these crumbed up at the store, but you can always dry some bread out, put it in a ziplock and pound the crap out of it to make your own.  That can serve two purposes. ;)
2 tbls brown sugar
2 tbls mustard
1/3 cup ketchup

After the meat is browned and any grease drained, mix together all ingredients in a bowl.  You can use a spoon, therefore you don't even have to touch the cooked meat!  I love that.  Once mixed pour into an 8x8 lightly greased pan and bake 30 to 40 minutes at 350.  I like to sprinkle a little extra brown sugar on the top before baking.
You can put anything with this to make a quick and easy meal, veggies, salad, some roles, or just cut up some apples and call it good.  I'm all about the quick and easy!

Review:
Hubby:  Excellent!
Big:  Great dinner mom!
Middle:  Best dinner every mom!
Little: (while pointing at the meatloaf) "What in the world is THAT?  GROSS!  It looks like that food the dogs eat that's in the fridge!"  Then after forcing one bite down, "Hey, that stuff's pretty good."  After the third and fourth bites, "This is realllly good mom."  After the plate is clean, "Can I have some more of that dog food stuff?"  Awesome.

When picking the wine to go with this meal I started with the reds, afterall a good meatloaf seems like a nice partner for a hearty red. Then I realized, this is actually turkey meatloaf and that would indicate a white.  So I looked at the side dishes...cornbread so maybe a light red; broccoli definitely feels like a white.  After about 10 minutes of this and the dog food getting cold ;) I decided to chuck it all and have a vodka soda.  It goes nicely with everything because it has very little taste and even less calories! HOLLA!

Happy Monday!