Don't let your meat loaf

I remember Sunday Dinner growing up. It consisted of my mom or dad throwing a chunk of meat and veggies into the crock pot before we headed out for church. We'd get home from church three hours later and before we'd even walk through the front door we'd smell it. The intense aroma of onions mixed with meat was overwhelming. Instantly we'd become one of Pavlov's dogs and salivate.

My mom would hurry and mix up some rolls, gravy and a salad while the rest of us changed out of our church clothes and into our lounge around the house all day clothes. Then we'd hurry into the kitchen to set the table for the feast.

Good times, good times.

Sunday Dinner these days are spent over at The King's parents house. My mother-in-law puts on a Thanksgiving-style dinner for us every Sunday. She's no slouch when it comes to cooking. The lady is talented. I'll be the first to admit it's the best meal we eat all week. I was a little surprised when she called me last Saturday afternoon to tell us that we could have the weekend off. We could eat Sunday Dinner at our own house and be together as our own little family.

Crap. That meant I was in charge of Sunday Dinner for The King, Babboo and myself.

I drove up to the grocery store on Saturday night with a list of items I would need.

Slab of meat. Check.
Onions. Check.
Carrots. Check.
Potatoes. Check.
Marinade? Why not. Check.
Biscuits. Check.
Bagged salad. Check.

Sunday morning before church I remembered that I needed to do something with this stuff.

Crap.

I hurriedly peeled the potatoes. And then mangled the peeler in the disposal. Threw in the baby carrots and chopped sweet onions.

But what else? I had no idea.

I soaked the meat in the 15-minute marinade and in passing read that I needed to brown the meat before putting it in the crock pot. Dude, I would have never known that I needed to do that. I almost ruined the entire meal. I figured I would need some sort of seasoning, but I didn't know what. Or how much. So I threw in some sprigs of rosemary I had sitting around from last week's meals, sprinkled some salt and pepper and called it good.

I closed the lit on the pot. (And when I saw "closed the lid" I mean I covered it with foil since my damn lid has never fit right in the 10 years I've owned it.) We headed off to church where I would spend the next 3 hours chasing Babboo around and changing no less then 3 poopy diapers in the name of the sweet Baby Jesus.

At least I wasn't slaving over a hot stove.

We came home from church and voila...dinner was served. It was easy and good and amazing and something I hope to do again.

We even had enough meat left over to make biscuit sandwiches for dinner the next night. I'm all for two easy dinners out of one.

All in all this dinner cost us like $6.00. That's pretty much free in my book. And seriously, it took like 20 minutes to make. Plus, The King loved it.

As far as I'm concerned, that makes it a hit.

Plus since I didn't have to spend so much time in the kitchen on Sunday night, it gave us time to venture out of the apartment and go for a walk around the city. Too bad the park was full of crazies so wasn't anybody to ask to take a picture of us together.