Three o'clock this afternoon rolled around, and I had a pound of ground beef and no plan. My husband loves meatloaf, but meatloaf isn't quite in the spirit of trying new things, now is it?
I decided a fair compromise would be to make an experimental side dish. My first order of business was to get the meatloaf into the oven. Since I had bulgur wheat leftover from a tabuleh recipe I tried, I added about 1/4 cup, in an effort to give my meatloaf a healthy bit of goodness. I also had some spaghetti sauce leftover, so I mixed that in isntead of ketchup or worschestire sauce, both of which I can live without. I got the loaf in to bake and began thumbing through the index of Rachael's cookbook, looking for a side rich recipe for which I had all the ingredients.
The only one i found was lemon rice pilaf, which looked good. The recipe called for a cup and a half of rice, so I got that cooking right away. It came to a boil, I set the timer to 20 minutes and loaded the dishwasher for 10 minutes or so.
After another 5 minutes, I looked again at the recipe and realized that she wanted uncooked rice, so in order to make the pilaf, I would have to start all over and it would be at least another 30 minutes.... and the meatloaf was getting close to done. So I decided that we would just have white rice and meatloaf.
Except. My husband (did I mention he loves meatloaf?) couldn't choke down the meatloaf.
So. We went to Albany's newest restaurant, House of Noodle. I had chicken pad thai, my daughter ordered shrimp pad thai, and Spencer ordered pork fried rice. We all enjoyed our meals, and the service was really fantastic. I guess my daughter didn't look like she was enjoying her meal enough, because the waitress offered to exchange it for anything else for her. The truth was that Madison had picked out all the shrimp and was full.
Sometimes you hit a home run, sometimes you go out.
ReplyDelete