meatloaf, not Meat Loaf

I don’t want you to turn away from this timeless entry because you’re not a fan of rock opera. I happen to own both the Bat Out Of Hell entries from the Meat Loaf catalog so neither title would have thrown me off the scent.

I bring up meatloaf because, for some ungodly reason, the other night I asked X if she’d ever had the legendary middle-American dish known as “green bean casserole with crunchy onions on top.” (Meatloaf and the casserole go hand-in-hand.) She was clearly perplexed by the lowbrow title because she’s simply not well-versed in Midwestern, nine-year old naming conventions. I described the royal dish to her in the simplest terms possible: can of beans, can of cream of onion soup, can of crunchy onions, and baking. That is the recipe. Those aren’t terms passed along in an attempt to make it easy for discussion purposes with the unknowing, that’s it – three cans and an oven. The memory of the ‘dish’ made me think about meatloaf and Minnesota, and they need to be addressed separately. First, the meatloaf. Anyone raised east of California and west of Cincinnati, in the area known to coastal liberals as ‘the large square-ish states region’, will swear that their mother’s meatloaf is the best meatloaf in the world. The World. They’ll swear on their mother’s meatloaf…it’s deathly serious business. I’ve had meatloaf "made" by other kids’ mothers and it isn’t any good, none of it. What I was thinking while I eating at their house, picking away at something dry and brick-like is, “Hey Brock, you need to come over to my house and get some really good meatloaf.” Of course, if he ended up staying for dinner the evening we happened to have meatloaf, he’s probably thinking, “Hey! This is the best meatloaf in the world.” I rest my case, your witness. About that Minnesota part. As I’m pontificating on my mother’s cooking I’m adding in little swaths of color and passing along witty anecdotes about my youth in the suburbs of the Twin Cities. I’m building a scene, directing a movie, giving my girlfriend some background on why I am the way I am. You see, I lived in Minnesota between the ages of 5 and 7, in a colonial-like house on Fondell Drive in Edina (if you click on the blue tacks you can see some of the sights!). The thing about neighborhoods in those days (the opening of the 1970s) was that the backyards on abutting blocks didn’t have fences…it was like open range. All the kids ran rampant through yards and streets playing kick-the-can and capture the flag. One of the families on the block behind us even had an early-70s, free-standing ‘tree’ house that we used to play on all the time. Late one fall afternoon I fell off the top of that son-of-a-bitch, broke my right forearm, and ended up waiting for the emergency room doctor to get back from dinner…just so he could re-break it over his knee before setting it. Wait, I digress, as is often pointed out. I was in the middle of this same idyllic background story, building to a crescendo, wending my way towards an anecdote about Mrs. Mary’s day care/nursery school, when X stops me, looks across the table, gets a goofy look on her face, and asks “how old were you?”; and “what street did you live on?”; and “the kid’s name was Rink?”; and “there were green beans in it?”. Yeah, I get it. She’s not much for details.

I’m going to give the green bean casserole with crunchy onions on top a shot this weekend. I sense the boys will move slowly around the pan, wag their tails, and sniff at it like it’s a new dog in the neighborhood. I’ll wait for my mother to forward the meatloaf recipe to me before I give that a go.

Love.

T.