Meatloaf Muffin Mania

Meatloaf....drool!

My love of playing with food is well documented--it is fun to experiment with different flavors and combinations to see what works and what I should do again. I was reading a forum that nominated Meatloaf as recipe of the month, and I thought this seemed like a recipe I might enjoy playing around with. So many different flavor profiles possible--a range of veggies, binders, meat mixtures, sauces! Rather than make a bunch of giant loaves, I want to make them into muffins so I can try lots of flavors and see what works.

I found this basic technique on the Food Network's website, it offers the formula for determining the proportions of meat, binder, veggies, add ins, and egg. I scaled it down for each meatloaf recipe. So the basic formula is:


1/2 lbs meat
1/3 cup binder
1/3-2/3 cup veggies
 1/4 cup egg substitute

 I came up with an assortment of possible add ins and binders to use with four different flavor profiles. I have a post for each flavor profile, with my thoughts, and will do a wrap up with observations on which things worked on a whole. Here are the options:

 Meats:

Ground turkey (I didn't look closely enough when I bought itand ended up with 80% lean--I could have just go all beef at that)
Ground beef (93% lean)
Extra lean hot Italian chicken sausage

Binders:

Italian seasoned bread crumbs
Panko bread crumbs
Ground Oat bran
crushed baked potato chips

Veggies:

Shredded zucchini
broccoli slaw
celery/green pepper
spinach

Cheeses:

Feta
Blue cheese
Parmesan

Add ins:

Mushrooms
red onion
roasted red pepper
roasted garlic

I also added about 2-3 tablespoons of a sauce into each meatloaf muffin. Traditionally this would be ketchup and Worcestershire sauce but I am no ketchup fan and wanted to highlight different flavor combinations that might not be traditional. So I used some pre-made sauces, and threw together some others to make a variety of different seasonings. I think if I had stuck with all pre-made it would have been faster, but I enjoyed playing around.

So these are the choices! Stay tuned to see what fun I have mixing them all together in different ways!