“Meat”loaf Dinner & Pumpkin Cheesecake

In my family, Sunday’s always meant a a family dinner. I guess you could say everyday in our house we always had a family dinner, even now, but Sunday was special. You could smell the dinner cooking all day and stop what ever your doing the moment you hear, “it’s ready, time to eat”.  My grandmother always put a Sunday feast on the table, and my Monday lunch box was always packed with a leftover creation.  She would make sandwiches from our left over meatloaf, chicken would be chicken salad, pasta was meatball sandwiches, and somehow they were always perfect, never soggy or dry, just perfect.  Just thinking of her meals, my mouth waters and I can still remember the taste after all these years.

I spent the majority of my day house cleaning.  The kind of cleaning and reorganizing that when you are 3/4 of the way through it looks worst then when you started.  I gave myself till 3pm to clean without interruption (cooking).  At three I took out my ingredients to  bake my pumpkin pie cheesecake.  I found a recipe on-line and tweaked it,  It was so easy.  All in the food processor.  I love the two layer effect.  I popped it in the oven at 3:30 with a 45 minute bake time.  That was just enough time to start my meatless meatloaf and have it oven ready when the cheesecake came out.

When baking meatless, meals require less oven time, so I have to adjust my time if I want to have roasted vegetables with it.  To help the process, I pre-steam my potatoes whole about 20 minutes if they are small, then I all my carrots, celery and onion to the steam basket to just soften them slightly,  Since my meatless meatloaf only bakes 45 minutes, I want my veggies to be just perfect at that time. 

While my veggies are steaming I made a mixture of re-hydrated TVP (meatless crumbles), oats and all the veggies, breadcrumbs and seasoning you would normally add to your mix.

Once the mix was blended, I shaped it into a loaf, spread a nice coating of sweet and spice bbq sauce over it, added all my steamed veggies and set the timer for 45 minutes.

The last few minutes I set the table, steamed a bag of mixed corn and peas, and baked a nice ciabatta roll to go alongside.

The dinner was fantastic.  Mya went crazy over the meatloaf.

Here are some pictures of the cooking process…

All Done…

Onto the Pumpkin Pie Cheesecake…