Meal No. 1501: Lamb Meat Loaf

On Monday night, with a package of ground lamb in the fridge that needed to be used, I turned again to my faithful Tupelo Honey Cafe cookbook and whipped out one of the favorites: lamb meat loaf. The recipe as written calls for a variety of mushrooms, diced and sautéed with onion, to be added with seasonings and crushed crackers to the lamb. I almost always just use shiitake mushrooms and we're generally pleased with the results here.

After making that huge batch of madeira vegetables for last Sunday's beef tenderloin and mashed potatoes, it occurred to me that those might be an interesting substitute for the mushrooms. And they were: the four of us at dinner have had this entree many times since my sister first gave me that THC cookbook. We agreed that it was particularly splendid on that night, as were the smashed sweet potatoes. It was just another really tasty meal for a fantastic company of friends.

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"Lamb and Multi-Mushroom Meat Loaf" (p. 150) and "Smashed Sweet Potatoes" (p. 128), in Tupelo Honey Cafe: Spirited Recipes from Asheville's New South Kitchen, by Elizabeth Sims with Chef Brian Sonoskus. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC, 2011.