Mac & Cheese Meatloaf

Last week a friend and I went to one of our favorite local restaurants. They sometimes have Mac & Cheese Stuffed Meatloaf but we’ve never been there when they had it so when we heard that it was on the menu, we both said “YES” and it was so good. I was telling Vince about and, of course, he wanted me to make it.

Any mac & cheese recipe and any meatloaf recipe will work. It’s probably best to use 97% lean ground beef because we probably don’t want all that fat in our mac & cheese.

For my mac & cheese, I used Patti Labelle’s Mac & Cheese recipe, though when you Google “Patti Labelle Mac & Cheese”, there are several versions of the recipe. I wanted the mac & cheese for stuffing to be a little less moist so I used less butter, less Half & Half and since I didn’t need to put cheese on top, I cut the cheese in half. Here’s the “adjusted” recipe that I used.

 

I made the whole recipe. I had enough meat to make two meatloaves, one for today and one for the freezer. I had three bags of mac & cheese for future meatloaves and a jar of mac & cheese that I can heat up as a side to serve with another meal.

For the meatloaf, use the recipe your family likes. It takes about 1-1/4 to 1-1/2 pounds of ground meat to give you enough for the bottom, sides and top of one meatloaf in a small meatloaf pan.

For the topping, I made a sauce of about equal parts (I didn’t measure) ketchup, BBQ sauce and spaghetti sauce, along with seasonings (Slap Ya Mama, black pepper, onion powder).

I baked it at 350° for about an hour and it was delicious. 

The next time, I make this and put it in the freezer, I will mix up up enough ground meat for 5 meat loafs (about 8 pounds of meat). I will divide the mac & cheese into 6 portions (one for serving as a side dish and five for the meatloaves. As I did today, I will wrap the mac & cheese in plastic wrap, I will divide the meat mixture into five equal portions, wrap each in plastic wrap, then place one bag of mac & cheese and one ball of  meat (wrapped separately) in one bag and seal it so that I have five “kits”, each with a sealed portion of mac & cheese and a sealed portion of meat mixture.

For the record . . this probably sounds like a lot of work but I started about 7 and was done by 8, and that includes baking the mac and cheese for 35 minutes and letting it cool enough to handle.

Each of these meatloaves will give us two meals. We’ll eat half and then have half for another meal. So, that means 10 meals from what I did in one hour. Not bad!