Food and Wine Meat Loaf with Creamy Onion Gravy

My husband absolutely loves meatloaf. When we first got married I only knew how to make the oatmeal, ketchup and ground beef variety of meatloaf that I grew up with. My dad was the same way as my husband and frequently requested my mom make his favorite dish, meatloaf. Over the years I have expanded my collection of meatloaf recipes, but have always come back to the dutch meatloaf recipe that I found about five years back. I'm lucky that my husband is easy to please and enjoys meatloaf slathered in ketchup. As I've stated to many times to count now we are a big pork family. My family loves pork! I have tried a few meatloaf recipes utilizing ground pork in the past and have been less than pleased with the experience. As I was glancing in a recent issue of Food and Wine magazine I came across a recipe for Meat Loaf with Creamy Onion Gravy, which combined pork and beef and looked like a great new recipe for meatloaf.

This recipe has 16 ingredients in the meatloaf and eight in the gravy. The meatloaf takes an hour and a half of cooking and prep time, 45 minutes of which is active and makes 12 servings. The creamy onion gravy takes approximately 45 minutes and makes 5 cups. All the ingredients were basic and easy to find at my local grocery store. I made my chicken stock from scratch, which took me about 6 hours the day before I prepared this dish. Additionally, I ground my own beef and pork, which added approximately 45 minutes to my overall time. I found that the gravy took longer than the 5 minutes suggested by the recipe to fully reduce, I would say it took me about another 10 minutes. The one major criticism I had with this recipe is that the recipe calls for a tablespoon and a half of salt. To me that is way more than needs to be added, especially since the cheese is already salty. The meatloaf ended up way too salty for my tastes. I would recommend cutting the salt significantly. I followed the remainder of the recipe as written.

My two boys loved this entire recipe and my husband ate it happy, as he would with any type of meatloaf. The creamy onion gravy turned out delicious and would work well over egg noodles. The meatloaf had a nice taste from the cheese, but needs the salt reduced for my family's needs. Other people might not have as much of a problem, I am very salt sensitive. I will definitely use the gravy recipe again and try it with egg noodles or steak.

For the recipe go to Meat Loaf with Creamy Onion Gravy.