five alarm frustration

I haven't made a meatloaf in a long, long time. The meatloaf from Saveur that emerged uncooked from my oven for the second time kind of put me off meatloaf for awhile, but I relented and picked up the ingredients to try one again when I was at the store the other day (this one is not from Saveur, obviously).

Meatloaf 3.0 cooked up lovely - 50 minutes at 375 worked really well. The hitch (yes, there is a hitch, of course. I'm talking about meatloaf, after all) was that when I opened the oven to peek at the meatloaf, a little bit of smoke escaped from the oven and set off the smoke alarm! Madeline was napping, so I quickly shut the oven, turned it off, threw the back door open and fanned the area beneath the smoke alarm. The shrieking subsided. But what do I do about getting the meatloaf out of the oven?

I didn't want the smoke alarm to go off again. I thought I had a brilliant idea - I'd disconnect it, take the meatloaf out of the oven (the amount of fat that cooks out of extra lean ground beef is icky - I don't want to know what regular ground beef would be like!), let the house air out, and then pop the battery back in. Easy peasy. So I pulled a chair up and untwisted the smoke alarm. But where was the battery? What was up with that electrical wire? Argh. Just my luck - the detector is hardwired intead of being battery operated.

I ended up leaving the meatloaf in the oven until it had cooled down enough that the grease wasn't smoking. I don't know if I will be trying Meatloaf 4.0 out anytime soon. I think I'm cursed.

Comments

[Lilly]

Umm.. what kind of dish did you cook the loaf in and on what rack did you place it in the oven? That can make all the difference. So can making it again, using the same recipe, with the door ajar like you would while cooking under the broiler.

I use a lovely Martha Stewart (the mom not the maven) meatloaf recipe. Works every time. You can search her site for it if you want to try it.

[laura]

Okay. I formed the loaf out of the raw ingredients and baked it in a large pyrex dish (lasagna-sized, not a loaf pan). The rack in the oven was in the middle. Thanks for the tip about the oven door ... :)

I did a search for meatloaf on Martha's site, and then I googled "martha stewart's mom's meatloaf" and the recipe that search turned up was the same as this more recently featured one: http://www.marthastewart.com/page.jhtml?type=content&id=recipe1170003&contentGroup=MARTHA&layout=martha Looks easy enough :)

[julie]

Laura... Meat loaf is gross. A big hunk of meat, ground up and then re-formed into a big hunk of meat. ??? It's compleatly illogical. Try a pig roast instead.

[laura]

But then I couldn't sneak in the spinach, broccoli, and carrots!