Great meat loaf, despite being too salty

Spicy Glazed Meat Loaf
The New Woman’s Day Cookbook Copyright 2005

¾ cup spicy tomato ketchup (or mix regular ketchup with about a teaspoon of hot sauce)
1 ½ lb lean ground beef
¾ cup seasoned dried bread crumbs
¼ cup grated Parmesan cheese
½ cup finely chopped onion
1 large egg
2 tsp minced garlic
1 tsp salt
½ tsp freshly ground pepper

1. Put ½ cup ketchup with the remaining ingredients into a large bowl and mix with hands or wooden spoon until well blended. Form into a 7 x 4 ½ x 2-inch loaf. Place in 3-qt or larger slow cooker; spread top and sides of loaf with remaining ¼ cup ketchup.
2. Cover and cook 4 hours on high or 8 to 10 hours on low, or until a meat or instant thermometer inserted in center of meat loaf registers 160 degrees F. If your slow cooker is deep and narrow, cut loaf in halves or quarters before attempting to lift it out.

Serves 6

This meat loaf was so easy to prepare. I used the chopper attachment for my hand blender to process the onions and garlic very finely, tossed everything in a bowl and then into the crockpot. It literally only took a few minutes. I lined my crockpot with two wide strips of nonstick foil, criss-crossed, so I could life the meat loaf out easily. I would suggest you do that because this meat loaf was very soft when it came out of the crockpot.

I made this after work Wednesday to eat last night, Thursday. To heat it up, I used a technique I've seen others use, and I grilled the slices of meat loaf. I used my George Foreman grill. It came out great this way. I think this might have been a disaster had I tried to serve this right out of the crockpot, since it was so soft.

My only complaint was my own fault. I'm usually smart enough to leave the salt out of recipes that have Parmesan cheese and other salty ingredients but I forgot to omit it this time and the meat loaf came out too salty. Otherwise, this was great.

Something I observed is that despite the vast variety of jellies, peanut butters, mustards, pickles, sandwich spreads, etc in the condiment aisle, the ketchup section is oddly uniform. The entire section was basically three brands of regular ketchup (Heinz, Hunt's and store brand) and the only variation was a few bottles of Heinz organic ketchup and Heinz low-sodium ketchup. There was no spicy ketchup, no ketchup with onions, no colored ketchup (wasn't green ketchup in the market for a while?), no small mom and pop gourmet brands. Odd, given America's love of condiments. I have several types of mustard in the house yet I've never bought anything other than the standard ketchup, even thought they used to stock the variations in my local store.

This is one of my newest cookbooks. I have the 'old' Woman's Day Cookbook (1995) too. I haven't cooked from that one too much but I did make a killer chocolate torte out of that cookbook once, so even if I never cook from it again, it earned it's place on the shelf. Hopefully, I'll end up making more than this one recipe from the newer version .

No question today. I was up with a feverish child most of the night and my mind is blank. Have a nice weekend!