This seems like a weird one, but is REALLY delicious!
My wife saw this old-style vintage recipe card, and as we are doing a Keto diet, this fits well into our diet.
Short version:
Steam a full head of cauliflower until it is about 60% done. (Still a little firm when you push a fork into the stem.) Take it out, cool it a bit.
Make meatloaf. (Saute onions and other veggies, mix spices and two raw eggs into 2lb of ground beef, add a cup of flavor like ketchup or BBQ sauce, add onion mixture.)
Place the cauliflower head into a casserole dish. Encase the top of the cauliflower in about a 1-inch thick shell of the meatloaf meat.
Put it in the oven at 350 for 45 mins or so. Cut like slices of cake, and enjoy!
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My modifications:
Before putting the steamed cauliflower into the baking dish, flip it over, and put some spices/sauce in between the "branches" of the cauliflower and deep into the head.
Before putting the steamed cauliflower into the baking dish, put a layer of the meatloaf into the bottom. (This is why I make double the amount of beef.)
The results of these two modifications is that you wind up with more flavor inside the head of cauliflower (which can be bland), and you also wind up with two types of meat: The browned traditional meatloaf on the top, and the stuff in the bottom of the dish that has cooked in all the juices that have dripped down during the cook.
We've had this every week for the last 4 weeks, and there is a LOT that can be done with this base recipe. Both surprising and delicious!
This is some wild shit. I love it! I notice that there's eggs in the meatloaf recipe, but no mention of breadcrumbs, or milk, which I am used to seeing as part of the binder when combined with the eggs. Any issues with it being too crumbly/not really holding together?
My wife and kid have to eat gluten-free so I've been rawkin' the Quaker Oats meatloaf a lot. It's tough to screw up.
I was not aware that this was a thing, but good to know! Do you follow that recipe? If so, how does it come out? I ask because even though the onion and other components do look like they add moisture, the fat content makes me wonder if this turns out on the dry side, though maybe the oats help to retain that moisture?
I am not a precision cook. I tend to favor forgiving recipes. I can say that I try to follow that recipe for the most part but often go "eh, this onion is big fukkit" or "one pound, two pounds, it's all meat what's the difference" and it hasn't failed. I find it to be too moist rather than too dry.
Oh yeah... I short-handed the meatloaf recipe. Assumed everyone had their own fave meatloaf, so I just put in the highlights of mine. My wife is gluten free, so we just used some of these delish almond flour crackers she has, and smashed them up for the bread crumbs.
I thought about this long and hard and I think I'm cautiously really really in favor of this. I'd be interested to see substitutions with impossible burger / turkey burger, and maybe doing a broccoli/feta/turkey loaf kind of thing. Texture usually winds up being where a new recipe wins or loses out in our kitchen. I'd be very interested to try this.
I was super skeptical about it when my wife showed it to me. Usually, I'm the cook; she finds something fun, and I tend to get excited about it and make it. But this just looked... too 1970's. Then my wife got tired of waiting for me to make it - I was skeptical, like you - and she made it. And it was YUMMY. So I've made it 3 more times since then.
Vintage recipe cards, you say? Do tell... James Lileks is an American tragedy. He published that as a book on September 11, 2001 and then in his capacity as a columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune came down hard in favor of the CIA torturing people at Abu Graib so all the gay men and ironic hipsters he'd gathered so far forgot his website so hard that he was never heard from again. Dude's got a wickedly catty sense of humor for a fascist asshole that thinks muslims aren't people.
This one is a particular gem: https://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/menucards/00misc/5.html And yeah... when my wife sent me the image of a vintage recipe card, THIS is the stuff I was expecting to see... not something weird and delicious!