Meatloaf

Every Sunday I try to spend One on One time with each of my four children doing a project/game/activity of their choice. We now have a rotation for who's turn it is to cook that week. They all seem to want to do a cooking project, so we had to figure out a way that seems fair.  Some hair-brained, crazy person (me) came up with the idea that we should do a Sunday where each kid helped make a different item for our dinner. We also decided they had to be new recipes, using ingredients I already had on hand (because I didn't want to go shopping!) and there were a few ingredients (sweet pototoes, cream cheese) that needed to be included because they needed to be used up. It was trickier to meet all this criteria than I thought!. Thank goodness for Pinterest! I spent 4 hours from start to finish, including cleanup, and was ready to pull my hair out by the end. But the kids loved it, and are begging to do it again sometime soon! We had drawn names to see who would do each recipe. Drake, age 7, drew the main dish, Meatloaf. Which is hilarious since he is the only one who would be truly disgusted by having to mash the ingredients together with his hands. This is based off of the Pioneer Woman's recipe, with a few changes. This meatloaf turned out incredibly moist and delicious. We will definitely be making this again soon!

Ingredients: 

Loaf:
1 cup Whole Milk 
6 slices White Bread 
2 pounds Ground Beef 
1 cup (heaping) Freshly Grated Parmesan Cheese 
2 cloves minced garlic
1/4 teaspoon Seasoned Salt 
3/4 teaspoons Salt 
Freshly Ground Black Pepper 
1/3 cup Minced Flat-leaf Parsley 
1 medium onion, diced 
4 whole Eggs, Beaten 
1 cup real bacon bits

Sauce: 
1-1/2 cup Ketchup 
1/3 cup Brown Sugar 
1 teaspoon Dry Mustard 
Tabasco To Taste

Put the 6 slices of white bread in a bowl and pour the milk over them. Let soak.

In another bowl combine ground beef with the remaining loaf ingredients. Add soaked bread to this meat mixture and mix together well using your nicely washed, clean hands. Divide evenly into two loaf pans. Make sauce and use ~1/3 of sauce to coat the tops of the loaves. Bake at 350 for 45 minutes. At this point I carely poured off some of the oil.* Then apply the rest of the sauce to the loaves and bake for 15 more minutes. Serve with mashed potatoes and gravy and a vegetable and you're all set!

*The original recipe calls for using a roasting pan, but I don't have one so we improvised. We also didn't wrap the loaves in bacon strips as called for in the recipe. Instead, we incorporated the bacon bits into the meat mixture because that is what we had on hand.