Neatloaf, Mashed Potatoes, and Gravy

For some reason, since I stopped eating terrestrial vertebrates, excuses to consume mashed potatoes have been few and far between. You'd think that an unassuming dish of smushed up roots would give little offense to my sensibilities. And it's true - I love mashed potatoes. I wish I could eat them every day. But I don't - I hardly ever do. What would I eat them with? You can't just sit down with a plate of mashed potatoes and a pile of beans and call it a meal. You can't really eat them with fish (the fish would slink off into the abyss of undetectability and viola, you've wasted $10). They're pretty good with meatloaf, though. Now, to remove the meat part...

...Not that hard, as it turns out. Instead, use a bunch of eggs and vegetables. Neat, right?

Oh, and I made gravy, too. It's something that I didn't care for too much while growing up, but have learned to cherish in very recent years. Or is it gravy? That thing I've been making? Maybe it's just a mushroom sauce. You tell me. I've never been that good at cramming content into an existing definition.

I should mention that although the recipe is not identical to anyone else's, and it was my idea to make it, I gathered a lot of ideas and ingredient/method inspiration from a blog post from Diets, Dessert, and Dogs.


NEATLOAF

2 slices fresh bread, the less refined the better (I used whole wheat, and also found that 2 slices made it taste too bready - I would use 1 slice next time)
about that volume in nuts of various kinds (I used walnuts and Brazil nuts)
2 medium carrots, shredded
1 onion, diced (about the same volume as carrots)
2-3 ribs celery, diced (about the same volume as onions)
Cooking oil
1 lb mushrooms
3 fat cloves garlic
few sprigs some fresh resinous herb (I used rosemary)
handful cilantro leaves (or parsley, you could use that)
Sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1/4 cup vegetable broth
1/4 cup dry red wine (note: I detest drinking wine, and wine drinking culture. I love it in food. Now I have a mostly full bottle that I don't want. If you also dislike drinking wine, I recommend going to Trader Joe's and getting three buck Chuck. At least you won't be wasting lots of money. And let me know if you have some ideas for me to finish this without having to drink it)
Ketchup
5 eggs

If you're making all three, make the neatloaf first. It takes awhile in the oven and then has to cool a little, so you can do other things while that's going on. And this is a time-consuming recipe, even with a food processor, though it's actually really simple and extremely forgiving. If you don't have a food processor, I'm sure it can be done, but... good luck. Try chopping really finely? Blending in small batches? I've never tried it. *clutches her Cuisinart*

1. OK. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Whip out the Cuisinart (have I mentioned how much I love my Cuisinart and am glad that my mom doesn't use it anymore, thus my inheritance of it? The thing's like, 30 years old and still amazing). Tear the bread up, and stick it in with the nuts. Use a bunch of nuts. Give it a whir until the nuts and the bread crumbs are all the same size, and all a bit crumby. Set them aside in a bowl, and use the grating attachment to put through the carrots. You could do this by hand, but it would take you 10 minutes instead of 20 seconds. Heat up a pan on the stove over medium heat, with some oil. Mix up all your carrots, onion, and celery together (it should be a huge heap) and cook it. Stir it every so often to make sure it's all getting heat, until everything starts to turn orange and the onions get a bit translucent. Then you can take it off the heat. And put it in a bowl.

2. Put the normal blade back in the food processor and process together the mushrooms, garlic, and herbs. You can actually do this while the other stuff is still on the stove. It doesn't take long. Just make a bunch of tiny bits, like the mushrooms in vegetarian burgers. Add this mixture to the emptied pan (again, over medium heat) with some more cooking oil. Stir every so often. It will let out liquid. (Hopefully you won't have to stop it halfway through cooking when you realize that you've made it to 25 without owning a corkscrew and you have an unopened bottle of red wine that you need to open so you can use the wine in your cooking, so you have to run to the nearest grocery store to supply your need. If you have a corkscrew, carry on.) When it's done letting out liquid, it should smell good. Add the vegetable broth and the red wine to the pan and stir it up. (Hopefully you won't have to stop the cooking again when you realize that you've also made it to 25 without ever using a corkscrew and as easy as it may appear, things look rough when the cork breaks off in the bottle and you have to run to the computer to Google, "how to remove broken cork from wine bottle," before discovering that the little wings on the corkscrew should go up when you're screwing in, not down, and you actually push them down to lift out the cork, and presto! you have two halves of a cork and an open bottle of wine. If you know how to use a corkscrew, carry on.)



3. Chuck a bunch of the carrot mixture into the food processor (at least half of it) and process it to be in teeny bits like the mushrooms. Then combine all the mushroom, all the carrot/onion/celery, and all the nut/bread crumb mixture together in the pan. Squirt some ketchup in there. I don't know how much. 3 tablespoons? Whatever seems right. Stir it all up and season to taste with salt and pepper.



4. Beat the eggs vigorously in a large bowl until they're foamy. With a whisk, it'll take a minute or two. Longer with a fork, less time with egg beaters. In any case, they should look like this:



You may now dump the whole mixture from the pan into the bowl with the eggs, and stir it until it makes a very, very thick batter.

5. Prepare a standard-sized loaf pan by greasing it. And flouring it, while you're at it. I just greased with olive oil (should have used a saturated fat) and skipped the flour, and... well, you'll see later what happened when I unmolded it. Anyway, when your pan is ready, put the mixture into it, smooth out the top, and pop it in the oven.



Cook it on the middle oven rack for about an hour, give or take (mine was an hour and 10, but the loaf pan was also sitting in a glass dish, which may or may not have slowed the heat), or until it gets to 160°F in the middle (find out using a meat thermometer or instant-read thermometer), which is the proper "cooked" temperature for eggs. If you don't have a thermometer, an hour should be OK.

MASHED POTATOES

3 lbs red potatoes
few sprigs rosemary leaves, minced
1-2 cloves garlic, pressed (a really fat one will suffice)
~1 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup vegetable broth
2-4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil, or butter (which I didn't have much of and wanted to save it for the gravy, so I used oil)
Sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper

If you're smart about life, you'll have more than 4 tbsp of butter on hand when you make a huge batch of mashed potatoes and gravy. That is all.

1. Slice your potatoes (I make 1/2-inch thick slices). Bring a huge pot of water to a boil, add a really fat pinch of salt, add the potatoes, return to a simmer, and cook for 10-15 minutes. You know, until they're done. Drain them and return them to the pot. While they're still hot, add the minced up rosemary and pressed garlic.

2. Mix it up a little, then add the buttermilk and vegetable broth, and oil or butter. (Hopefully, when you ran to the store earlier you'll have also picked up a potato masher. But because you didn't, and dag nabbit, you've got something in the oven and can't go again, you will make this work and you will use the slotted spoon as awkwardly as it takes with enough elbow grease to KILL a man! If you have a potato masher, carry on.) I've never used vegetable broth before in my potatoes, or olive oil, but let me tell you this: I was really pleasantly surprised. It was almost better than butter. (I was able to serve it with a little butter, and that kind of toppled it over the hill of splendid and into the valley of amazing graze. You know, where the happy cows live.) Mix it up some more, and add salt and pepper to taste. It should taste pretty spectacular.

MUSHROOM GRAVY

2-3 tbsp butter or a mixture of butter and cooking oil (as long as butter is at least half of the mixture, which it was for me. All butter is ideal, if you have it)
2 cups sliced mushrooms
2-3 tbsp flour
~2 cups vegetable broth
~1/2 cup heavy cream
no more than 1/4 cup dry red wine

I love making mushroom gravy with wine. It has the most alluring fragrance. But once I used too much wine and it tasted then like too much wine. I didn't like that nearly as much. So don't go overboard.

1. Heat up your butter/oil in a skillet over medium heat until the butter foams, like so.

Add the mushrooms and coat them. Like so.



Let them cook in there for several minutes, turning them every so often, until they let out their liquid and then start to brown. Let them brown. Let them brown until you smell the teeniest, faintest hint of charcoal. You will also see a golden brown color developing on your pan. The French call it "fond." I call it flavor. In any case, it'll come off the pan and go into the gravy, which is what we want.



2. Then add the flour and toss it together to coat all the mushrooms. Try not to have flour clumps. As soon as you smell toasting flour (which should be very soon), slowly pour in the vegetable broth and whisk as you do. You don't want flour clumps at this point, but if you get a few, don't worry too much. You probably won't notice later and now you can be more vigilant when you make gravy in the future. It'll start to bubble, which is good. Turn down the heat to medium-low.



3. Carefully pour in the cream, whisking as you go. Do the same with the wine. The contents of the pan should have a very slightly musky purplish hue.



Bring it back up to a gentle simmer, and let it cook for about 10 minutes, stirring every so often. It'll thicken a little, and don't worry if it seems a little thin in the pan, when it cools ever so slightly it will thicken up a good deal.

4. Finish up by bringing the neatloaf out of the oven, because, miraculously, it happens to be time. It should be browned on top, and a bit cracked. Let it cool in the pan for 10-20 minutes.



Carefully run a thin knife around the sides to separate it from the pan. Invert it onto a cutting board or similar surface. If you used a thin oil and didn't flour your pan, you might see this on the cutting board after inverting it:



and something that is undoubtedly the missing piece still in the pan, but if you're as clever and industrious as I am, it won't really matter. Very much.



You see? Nobody will know.

5. Slice off a piece and serve yourself, with some potatoes, and gravy over both. And if you're feeling spunky, you'll have made some braised collards or something (spinach would have been nice) to go on the side.

There we have it. The moral of the story, as far as I'm concerned, is not to get worked up about things that happen to go wrong when you're cooking. Or itty bitty oversights you may have made prior to engaging in your own personal cooking competition. What would an Iron Chef do? Use it to your advantage. Learn from it. Make a Hyperbole and a Half-esque comic strip, if you will. You will still have a good dinner.