21 days to 2010: Foody Friday: turkey/soy flaxseed meatloaf!

I've shared my meatloaf adventures before (not to be confused with my Meat Loaf adventures, LoL!), but today I'd like to highlight my most recent experiment: turkey/soy flaxseed meatloaf.  Yeah try saying that three times fast:

. . turkey/soy flaxseed meatloaf!

. . . turkey/soy flaxseed meatloaf!

. . . . turkey/soy flaxseed meatloaf!

The soy part was, as usual, a pack of fake ground beef soy crumbles from MorningStar Farms.

The turkey was a roll of 97/3 Honeysuckle White.

But I was out of breadcrumbs!! fyi, breadcrumbs are used to add bulk and moisture, and to kinda hold things together, so I couldn't just leave it out... So I looked for a substitute ... Found a suggestion to use oatmeal instead of breadcrumbs, and another suggested flaxseed.


Seeing as I had recently bought us a box of Milled Flax Seed, I figured this would be a good way to sneak in some Omega-3 oils into the dish, especially considering the previous box took years to get finished!

But precisely because flaxseed is mega-rich in oils, I knew it wouldn't be wise to do a 1-to-1 substitution: instead of 1.5 cups breadcrumbs, I used about 1 cup milled flaxseed.  All other ingredients remained pretty much the same.


Because I was worrying about breadcrumb substitution, I forgot about my usual diced celery addition.  Oh well.  Totally remembered the "bonus" boiled eggs, tho, yay!  You can see them here, picture taken as I was transferring the soy/meat/flaxseed/etc mixture into the loaf pan.

Then genius that I was, I forgot to set the timer while it cooked.  Once again I'm very glad I got us a meat thermometer, it's come in handy in cases like this, making sure the internal temperature was high enough.

The end product was definitely oilier than usual:




Here's a glimpse of the meatloaf we'd helped ourselves to it for dinner: that's a bit of egg peeking out at ya, and you can see the pooled slime excess oil at the bottom:




All-in-all it was still a decent experiment, although because of the excess (good) oil, the meatloaf felt a little slimy. Still good, though. Maybe next time I'll try the oatmeal substitute, since that would add some good fiber to the dish.

How about you -- have you had any substitution adventures before? How did they turn out?

NOTE: Images of MorningStar Farms' Meal Starters Grillers Recipe Crumbles, Honeysuckle White 93/7 Lean Ground Turkey Roll and Hodgson Mill's Brown Milled Flax Seed products were taken from their websites.

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