When I wrote about the salisbury steak option for prison dinner a few months ago, I mentioned that it was a substitution for meatloaf on the Bureau of Prisons menu. I don’t know why they made such a change, though I have an easy time imagining that somebody got a great deal on tons of pre-packaged, powdered gravy and felt that it would be cheaper to pour that over low-quality ground meat than to pour cut-rate tomato soup over it and call it “tomato sauce.” It’s also bizarre because meatloaf is such a classic American comfort food that it generally pretty popular among the incarcerated — and you could always refuse the sauce — so taking it away could only produce grumbling and further discontent. But perhaps that was the point. Just one more thing with which to poke the bear.
The past couple weeks I have gone on a bit of a bender in terms of cooking. I normally make dinners for us, but for whatever reason, the end of summer has inspired me to go on a spree of sauteing, roasting, boiling, and baking. There are a couple reasons for this. First, I thought I would make my lovely spouse some perfectly delicious homemade “TV Dinners,” something that can be made in advance, frozen in a microwavable tray sealed inside a vacuum bag, and simply reheated at the office. It’s better than prison, but cheaper than take-out. That’s not exactly a best-of-both-world approach, but it will probably do for now. I also got inspired because I happened to look around in the freezer, pantry, and refrigerator and discovered that there was quite a bit of food that could make potentially tasty meals, but that we had never yet gotten around to cooking. So, it became time to use things up and see how far much I could make with as few trips to the grocery as possible.
In prison meatloaf is also called “cat heads” because it’s served to you in little balls formed by an ice cream scoop. They are about the size of a cat’s head. Just to be clear, the meatloaf isn’t bnaked and then scooped. Rather it’s formed into cat heads first, and then put in the oven. We had a couple pounds of meatloaf mix that had been perfectly cryo-sealed since Christmas, so I felt that meatloaf might be a good option for one of the homemade TV dinners. After all, it’s a frozen foods classic, right? We also had a bunch of freezable and microwavable three-sectioned trays sitting around, and so in the spirit of mimicry, I set about cooking.
There is nothing special about the meatloaf I made. Indeed, the only ytick to it is trying to figure out how to handle the recipe so that it tasted good AND can be reheated nicely from frozen using just a microwave oven. I think I probably have a handle on the former, but I will need to keep tweaking the latter. So, the meatloaf is just a few ingredients: meatloaf mix (ground beef, pork, and veal all hacked up together), salt pepper, minced onion, minced green pepper, ketchup, bread crumbs, and whatever other seasonings strike you fancy when you look into the spice rack. As far as proportions go, I wanted just enough vegetables to give some contrasting texture and bits of flavor in the midst of all that meat, but not enough for someone to look at and think I’d made a soured attempt at going vegetarian. We also happened to have green peppers and onions in the vegetable garden that needed to be harvested and eaten, so the choice there was simple. I mixed everything up with my hands and formed the whole mixture into six little loaves. Each loaf then got wrapped in a slice of raw bacon, placed on a baking sheet, and popped into a 350 degree oven for about an hour. I was a bit surprised they they came out somewhat overdone, though they still had good flavor. The adjustment for the next time will be to undercook them just slightly and let the microwave finish cooking them on the final preparation stage. That should give me a little better texture. More loafy and less crumbly.
Because there are three compartments in the tray, I obviously needed to make three dished for this TV dinner. So I chose the classic frozen food side of mashed potatoes. I make mashed potatoes all the time. I can do it in my sleep and still have them come out great. The freeze and reheat cycle, however, turns out to provide a bit of an extra challenge. I foten use milk to moisten the boiled potatoes while I mash them, but though milk allegedly freezes well, I’m not so certain that it does so when combine with potatoes. Next time I’ll use stock and see how that turns out. I also hand mash/whip my potatoes, and that gives me a nice smooth but “imperfect” consistency when finished. That imperfection doesn’t translate, however, into the free-cook cycle. It occurred to me that the primary texture of TV Dinner potatoes is that there is not a chance of finding any actual piece of potato in them. They have been pureed to. a pure, silky pulp. Next time My potatoes get the full puree, too. After I thought about it, it only made utter sense; you can’t have any unevenness in the food you want to reheat, for that will produce somewhat uneven (though I suppose utterly human) results. So look out spuds, your serious beating is coming.
What could possibly go into compartment #3 of my tray? Well, vegetables would have been a sane and healthy choice. They are also terrifically generous with the freeze/microwave cycle. But why take the healthy choice when I could go for a treat? Besides, is the veggies cooked too much on the reheat phase, they would start getting that canned vegetable consistency, and after 5 years of nothing but canned veggies in prison, that would have been too traumatic an outcome for me. The odd thing is that I even used to enjoy the texture and ridiculous over-saltedness of can vegetables once in a while, but then I went to prison….. Just another piece of Americana ruined by the actual institutions of America. So no veggies, but a treat. Yet what kind of treat? Then it hit me. Microwave brownies are really simple to make and, if you filled a compartment with just the raw batter they would cook to fudgy completion in just about the same amount of time it would take to reheat the meat and potatoes. And so I was forced to begin a set of experiments with “microwave mug”-style brownies to see which ones I could best adapt. Turns out that this experiment was incredibly successful. The brownie batter itself is super simple; it’s all a question of proportion. For the dry ingredients: equal portions of flour and sugar mixed together with a pinch of salt (or more than pinch if you are making a lot; my experiment started off with 3Tbsp each of flour and sugar, enough to fit in a single coffee mug). To that you add half the amount of unsweetened cocoa powder as you have sugar. That is a ratio of 2 flour: 2 sugar: 1 cocoa powder. Stirr that all up together. Then add the same amount of milk as you added flour and the same amount of vegetable oil as you asses cocoa powder. Then add a small bit of vanilla extract to everything. Stir that up and you will have a really dark and pretty liquid batter. Then drop in a good handful (more of less that same proportion as the cocoa powder) of chocolate chips and stir them in. Spoon the batter into that 3rd compartment so it comes about halfway up the side.
Once I got everything portioned out into the trays, I put a little brand-name ketchup on the meatloaves; next time around, thanks to a good tomato season in the garden, I’ll try putting some homemade catchup on them. Then I put the lids on the trays and them busted out the trust vacuum sealer and sealed each package up individually. From there they went into the freezer. Then from the freezer to the lunch back to the fridge at work to the microwave to the stomach. So far they haven’t been rejected, though they have been fairly critiqued. I’m pleased with that. It’s not prison. It’s not takeout. But it is a way trying to honor the traumatic past and reshape it for the future. A different way of using food for comfort, perhaps.