Meatloaf: Meatloaf with a Ranch Twist

Aug 23, 2010 I rarely vary from my tried and true sage, bell peppers and onions based family recipe but wanted something different today. I feel bad about rating this because I made so many changes. It’s one of those days I used what I had, and based it loosely on some recipe from some unfortunate submitter on AR. (Sorry, Chihuahua Girl) You know..the kind of dishes that never can be duplicated again, no matter how good it turns out? And mine turned out GREAT! I was into Southwestern but leary of it tasting like taco meat, as one review of a SW style recipe, mentioned. Wanted it more like my regular sage meatloaf (the sage addition is why I zeroed in on this recipe among the many) with a SW flare. Used real onions and garlic instead of powders. Used bell pepper (hark back to family recipe) and some pickled jalapenos for a SW kick…but still not a taco/salsa based flavor. For filler I used torn, stale hard rolls I had (family recipe stuff….I like torn stale bread for the texture instead of bread crumbs) and used a Salsa Ranch salad dressing I had, (oops…I did sneak salsa in there) instead of the dry mix. Omitted the milk because the dressing was already liquid. I made the sauce as written with V8 and doubled it. There’s some ketchup in my family recipe but I never put ketchup on top of it, didn’t bake any of the sauce on top of this either. This sauce was a nice compliment to the ranch flavor. Surprising how the sweet sauce toned down my SW spiceiness without being sour cream-like.

—JUSTCYN 

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