Building Something Awesome!

I was hanging out with my wife at my brother in laws house the other day and somehow it came up that he had two pounds of ground beef that he wasn't going to use. I'm not sure what the exact circumstances were, but he had already taken it out of the freezer, so it wasn't as simple as putting it back in the freezer. I pretty much grew up eating beef, though these days it is pretty rare that I eat it since @mrsbozz doesn't eat it. I'll occasionally have a burger or steak, but those moments are few and far between.

That's why I was a bit surprised when she said we could take the extra ground beef. I had to quick think of something that I could do with it. I've been wanting to try making some meatloaf on the Weber Kettle for a while now, so this was my chance. I gave @mrsbozz a list of stuff I needed from the grocery store (really it was just a green pepper, we had everything else), and she made it happen when she picked up groceries.

I took a bit of the beef and made a patty for us to have burgers on Wednesday night (my wife had a ground chicken burger), and then the rest of the beef I mixed together in a bowl. I chopped up about half of the green pepper, a bit of yellow onion, and then I sprinkled some Kinder's brand Italian chop house seasoning as well as some Italian herb and garlic seasoning. I also threw in some Italian bread crumbs, and a splash of milk.

Oh yeah, if you stuck around for the HIVE Thrive afterparty the other day, you know that I had some work I had to do for one of my tech support side hustles. The family I visited needed a new mesh router system installed. It took me about an hour to get it all set, and in addition to the cash they paid me, they also gave me some fresh garlic. I threw some of that in my meatloaf as well.

Here are the loaves before I put them on the grill. My wireless probe wasn't charged up, so I had to use my old wired probe. Unfortunately, the probe is so big it was touching the side of the pan and it was giving me false readings. The good news is, about halfway through the cook, the Chef IQ wireless probe got charged up, so I was able to throw that in the biggest loaf and get a proper reading.

These were fairly small loaves only adding up to about a pound and a half. As you can see, the beef also had a pretty high fat content, so a lot of that was lost in the cooking process. I started with probably about a 1.75 pounds of beef and I would guess the total weight after grilling was around 1.25 pounds. I could be a little off there. It took just about 30 minutes for the loaves to get up to the 160 degree temperature I was looking for with the grill running around 350 to 400 degrees.

I would have like to have put a layer or bacon on the top of them or at the very least a nice sweet and savory glaze, but I didn't. Since @mrsbozz doesn't eat them, I decided to slice them up and make some leftovers for my lunches with them. If I had been eating them right away or serving them to someone else, I would have done the glaze or bacon layer. It's definitely something to consider for the future.

Despite that, they turned out freaking amazing. I snatched a couple of chunks while I was slicing them up and the flavors were so amazing! The seasonings, vegetables, and other ingredients married together so well to make an absolute savory delight. Plus it had that nice smokey flavor that you would expect from a grilled piece of meat like this.

I feel like meatloaf gets a bit of a bad rap as being old fashioned, or bland, or dry. I'm telling you, this is how you need to do it. Don't sleep on grilled meatloaf, it's freaking awesome. If I had my own restaurant, this would totally be on the menu!