Foody Friday: another meatloaf variation

Hey hey hey, this is my first Foody Friday installment in a long long time! And what do I feature but that old versatile favorite, MEATLOAF! The one you pop in the oven and eat, not the one you (well, *i*) listen to, LoL!

About a year ago I talked about my turkey/soy flaxseed meatloaf experiment, which ended up a little oily/slimy. I'm sure I've revisited it since then yet I have no recollection of doing so. Anyhoo, yesterday I decided to whip up some meatloaf, à la lynne, of course.

Here's what I used:

1 packet Jewel Onion Soup mix
½ cup milled flaxseed
½ cup instant oatmeal
2 raw eggs
¼ cup hot bbq sauce from Lil Porgy's
¼ cup sweet vidalia onion relish
¼ cup diced celery
1 can petite diced tomatoes with green chiles, undrained

1 packet Morningstar Farms fake ground beef
1.25 lb ground turkey

1 cup shredded cheese (I used mexican fiesta blend)

Instructions:

Mix the first 3 ingredients well in a (very) large bowl, then add the subsequent 5 ingredients. Mix well.

Add the meat & fake meat, mix well.

Slop about half into an aluminum foil-lined loaf pan, press down well.

Spread the cheese on the meat mixture in the pan.

Fill in the rest of the meat mixture, making sure to mash everything in well, I think that helps reduce the crumbliness of the cooked product.

Pop it in the oven (preheated to 350F) for what turned out to be about 1.5 hours. I got the internal temperature to 150+F, ideally it should have gotten to 160F but it had been cooking so long I didn't want it to dry out. Perhaps I should have upped the overall temp to compensate for the greater volume of stuff I put in there!

And here's the finished product:

MmmMmmmMMmmmMmm cheeeeeeeeeeese!

It was cheesy with a bit of a bite thanks to the chiles *and* bbq sauce: delicious!

It was also rather crumbly,
but this usually improves once it cools / is in the leftover stage

Here's what I would do differently next time:

• Mix the cheese in with the other dry/wet ingredients, which was what I had meant to do but forgot until I had already dumped half the mixture into the pan :p
• Look into what makes a good binder: I like not using nutritionally-worthless breadcrumbs, I wonder if I could just up the oatmeal used?

I enjoyed this experiment. Tell me if you try this out for yourself, k?

Have a great weekend!