Cooking Simplicitea

I know what you’re thinking. Meatloaf in a mug? Can’t be all that tasty. But wait - there’s more! It’s even microwavable! And it is, in fact, delicious, as well as quick, easy, and cheap! I can’t think of a better combination of words to describe a recipe, especially one that I’m going to start taking for lunches in a ziploc bag. The only downside? One serving never quite feels like it’s enough.

Difficulty: Incredibly easy! (So easy that I had trouble knowing what to tkae pictures of!)

Ingredients:

1 slice white bread

1 tablespoon milk

1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon brewed tea of choice, strong

1/4 lb ground beef

1 green onion, sliced (optional)

1 teaspoon tea leaves, ground

salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

Tear the bread up into pieces - and when I say pieces, my personal experience with this recipe tells me that I really mean itty bitty tiny crumbs, or as close to that as you can get. If I had an immersion blender, I might fool around with that to get it as torn up as possible. (I was making a double recipe in the following pictures,  if yours looks a lot smaller.)

Add the milk and the tea, and mix together until the liquids have been absorbed by the bread. Add the rest of the ingredients, and mix together well - it takes a while to properly mix together the beef with the bread, so work it with your hands until it’s mostly-uniform and looks almost like it’s just well-marbled.

Plop it in a mug, and throw it in the microwave at 70% power for 5 minutes, or until the centre is no longer pink.

Enjoy!

If you try this recipe, let us know! You can reblog us or add a picture of it to our Flickr stream for this recipe, just use the tag “csmeatealoaf”

Nutrition Facts:

Coming soon!

This was the middle recipe from our tea cooking day, together with the Forbidden Fruit Chicken and Vanilla Oolong Blueberry Pie. There weren’t really many photos of the process to make this, but that’s mostly because it’s ridiculously simple! Its simplicity hides complex flavours, though - the Cabernet Sauvignon and goat cheese that make this recipe fairly unique complement each other wonderfully.

Difficulty: Incredibly easy!

Ingredients:

1 cup Cabernet Sauvignon (or another strong black tea - I would also suggest their Lapsang Souchong)

1 package gravy mix (we used pork-based)

Grated marbled cheese (we didn’t measure how much we used - “lots” would be about as accurate as I’d like to get!)

Goat cheese (we used the remainder of the package from the Forbidden Fruit Chicken recipe)

French Fries (we used an entire package of McCain’s straight cut)

Directions:

In case you couldn’t tell from the ingredients list, this is only very loosely called a ‘recipe’.

First, start steeping a pot of your tea - make it nice and strong! While that’s steeping, make the fries according to the package’s directions.

Once they’re in the oven, prepare the gravy according to the directions on the package, using your tea in place of whatever liquid it calls for. Let it simmer while you’re waiting for the fries to cook.

Put the french fries in a large bowl or plate, then coat in grated cheese (and, if you have them, cheese curds would make this something closer to traditional poutine). Dollop on the goat cheese - try not to make the bits too large, and try to space them out fairly evenly. Once that’s done, it’s time to pour on the gravy!

And enjoy! Between the four of us, this was what the dish looked like five minutes later, according to the camera’s clock:

If you try this recipe, let us know! You can reblog us or add a picture of it to our Flickr stream for this recipe, just use the tag “cspouteane”.

Nutritional Info to come!