Cooking Our Way to the Magic Kingdom (Meatloaf) °o° *•._.•* ‘ *•._.•* °o°

Mark and I decided that since it’s Mark's dream to work for Disney in the culinary arts, we would build a portfolio of culinary experiences.

Until we have more blog-news making experiences in the area of our relocation, this will be an ongoing feature (as budget permits), where we will choose a recipe that looks good, cook it up, take some pictures for you, and then include our review of the finished product.


We thought that a fun way to share these adventures (and to relate them to our theme-blog) would be to look to the Disney catalog of recipes, namely “Cooking With Mickey” volumes 1 and 2, and “Delicious Disney”, which collectively contain hundreds of park favorites.

This week we made an easy, comfortable choice; meatloaf! The comfort food of comfort foods. This relatively easy recipe was featured in Orlando at the Disney Village Market place in Chef Mickey’s Village Restaurant.

Unfortunately, Ken is STRONGLY anti-onion... and mushrooms, celery, bell peppers, and most seafood (and as Mark says, "basically, the fundementals of all cooking-the mirepoix"), so we will be cooking slightly altered versions of the Disney recipe, but we plan to stay as close as possible to the original.

The recipe was for a family of six so since there are only two of us, we decided to cut it in half. The full recipe is at the bottom of the post.

Photo credit: WDWnews.com


Sadly, we do not have photos to share.  The day after baking this dish, we had a computer crash, and lost everything from the last 24 hours.  We were lucky-we didn't lose much, and we were able to recreate everything EXCEPT the meatloaf pictures. Thanks, WDW News!

This photo is courtesy of me.  Since the back cover lines up with the front to make one great Disney scene, I thought you would like to see it laid out.

RESULT: We had very good results for our first meatloaf.  The half recipe was the perfect size for a meal for two, and then left overs for lunch the next day.  The texture was surprisingly smooth, and the herbs and spices were just great. 

We cooked our loaf for one hour as called for, and it looked perfect, but we like a more crispy outer shell, so we gave it another 15 minutes.  That gave us a perfect, juicy inside with a crunchy outside.  I would suspect that if you were making the full recipe, you will probably need to bake for more than one hour in order to cook all the way through.

THE RECIPE:

Meatloaf

Chef Mickey’s Village Restaurant

Disney Village Marketplace

Yield: 6 servings

2 pounds ground beef

1 pound ground pork

1 ½ cups onion, diced

1/8 teaspoon garlic, granulated

2 cups bread crumbs, fresh

2/3 cup cold water

1/8 teaspoon thyme

¼ cup parsley, chopped

1 whole egg

1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

1/8 teaspoon salt

Soak break crumbs in cold water and set aside.  Sauté diced onion until tender.  Set aside and allow to cool.

Preheat oven to 350 degree.

In a large bowl, combine ground beef, ground pork, onions, granulated garlic, and bread crumbs mixed with water.  Mix well and add remaining ingredients. Mix well and mold into loaves.  Form in either loaf pans or in a meat pan with sides high enough to hold juices.

Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour.

Comments are welcome. Positive feedback encouraged!

Mouseketeer Ken

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We highly recommend this recipe!  8 Mickey Heads out of 10!