Pastel de Carne

For those of you who don't know--I'm working on a book. Sometimes I work on it in a frenzy, other days I get bogged down by the fact that when I'm through with it I won't know what to do next. Maybe just go to Kinko's? Who knows? But I'm writing about what we went through in order to become Henry's parents.

Lately I've been more focused on working out, trying not to kill the dog (whose adoption fell through!), and painting the kitchen than I have been about the book. So today I went to sort of read through everything and put stuff in some sort of order. (I've got like 200 pages completed, but it isn't in chronological order and some of it is very rough.) So I'm searching through files on my computer and I come to a file called "Meatloaf Recipe". This wasn't shocking as I've titled some of my chapters pretty odd things. Things like "Mick Jaggar is a seat filler", "I love drugs", "Not enough Valium", and, my favorite "There's a Needle in my who-ha."

But I couldn't for the life of me remember when I'd ever written about Meatloaf. Was in in remembrance of the first meatloaf I ever made in my first year of marriage? I didn't have a recipe so I just through some stuff in a loaf pan with some hamburger meat and cooked it. That sounds right, doesn't it? But apparently those green flecks in meat loaf are green peppers--not pickles, and you are supposed to use ketchup, not salsa. So we have come to call this "Mexi-Meatloaf" and it has never been served in the Phillips house again. (Although my sweet husband ate it.)

Nope. I've never written on Meatloaf. It was, in fact, shockingly, a meatloaf recipe by Alton Brown.