Tondemo Skill De Isekai Hourou Meshi

Chapter 166-170

Ch 166 — Meatloaf

It was time now to make dinner for everyone. I had a lot of Orc and Bloody Horn Bull meat I had minced yesterday and I decided to use up more of it by making a meatloaf. It had been a long time since I had meatloaf and with all that minced meat to hand, well...

I could bake a meatloaf in the Black Magic Cooking Stove's oven while I cooked other things like rice on the top burners separately, very convenient. The meatloaf I made for myself wasn't much like a commercial product, it was a lot simpler but I liked the taste and it went well with rice. Yosh, let's get started.

To make things easier I bought most of the ingredients from the Net Super. I already had a good stock of onions, ketchup, Worcester sauce, red wine and bread crumbs but I needed other things like bacon, frozen mixed vegetables (this would save me a lot of washing, peeling and chopping), boiled quail eggs, regular hen eggs, butter and pound cake baking tins for the final product.

I washed some rice and let it soak before cooking while I got started on the meatloaf. First I dunked breadcrumbs in milk in a bowl then chopped up onions before frying them in melted butter in a frying pan. Once they became translucent I dumped in the frozen mixed vegetables and stirred them in to the accompaniment of a cloud of steam and sputtering. I added minced Bloody Horn Bull meat to the bowl with the milk-softened breadcrumbs then added the fried onions and mixed vegetables. I broke in some regular hen eggs and seasoned the mix with salt and pepper and a touch of grated nutmeg before kneading the mixture until it was consistent and a little sticky.

My recipe isn't much different from making hamburger patties really, the main change ups are the mixed vegetables and the boiled eggs and the way it was cooked. Once I had a large amount of the meatloaf mix ready I greased up the pound cake baking tins and lined them with strips of bacon. I added some of the meatloaf mix, spreading it evenly across the bottom of the tins and making sure there were no bubbles of air trapped. I added the quail eggs two by two across the bottom layer before filling the tins with the rest of the meatloaf mix, again making sure there were no trapped air bubbles. I folded the bacon protruding around the edge of the tins over the top of the mix and covered them with foil before I put them into the preheated oven.

Normally I'd bake a meatloaf like this at 200 degrees for about 30 minutes but the Black Magic Cooking Stove's oven didn't have a temperature setting so I'd just have to judge it by eye. Now for the rice. I lit the Black Magic Cooking Stove's burners and started boiling the clay pots full of washed rice and water while the meatloaf baked in the oven below.

Meatloaf is easy to cook, it's a large dish which I could easily monitor to prevent it burning. As the rice pots on the burners up top steamed away I opened the oven door and peered in.

"They may be ready soon..." I muttered to myself, poking a bamboo skewer in through the foil of one of the meatloafs to test it. When the juices that oozed out were transparent I took the meatloafs out of the oven and started making the sauce. I drained off the gravy from the pound cake tins into the frying pan then added butter, ketchup, red wine and chuno sweet sauce and simmered it.

I extracted the meatloafs from the pound cake tins (the bacon lubricated everything, better than baking parchment and, well, bacon!) and cut one of them into thick slices. Fer and Sui each got three slices while Dora-chan got two, placed on plates and covered in sauce. I reserved the ends for myself since I liked the crunchier drier pieces.

"Right, it's ready." I announced and as soon as the plates were put down everyone started eating.

"Nuuu, has this got vegetables in it...?" Fer asked telepathically as he consumed the meatloaf. "I can't avoid them, but I suppose it's tasty enough." Fer was an absolute meat supremacist but eating veggies was good for him and the others. With meatloaf, well, he couldn't avoid eating the mixed vegetables and leave them in his dish like he did on other occasions. I suspected he was objecting to the vegetables because he thought he had to uphold his position on meat-eating, nothing more. His jaws didn't stop even when he was complaining.