Coming up with recipes from scratch is an art. You have to know how to mix tastes and smells to create something that tastes great. Or you can be like my husband, who is what I would call  “a master of substitution”. He can take a recipe and substitute the ingredients (or all of them) to come up with a dish that can be drastically different from the original recipe but would still blow your taste buds away.

Compared to my husband, I consider myself only an amateur in terms of substitutions, but I also like to make variations of recipes depending on the ingredients that I have in hand, or depending on my mood ( for example if I need a picker upper, adding a healthy amount of chocolate chips to a cookie recipe always seems like a good idea). The beauty of variations is that you can basically have endless possibilities based on what you have available. The two recipes in this post here are “variations” of recipes , if I may say so.

The meat loaf  is a variation of a recipe my mom used to make…a very far stretched variation; because the recipe I started from was stuffed tomatoes. Okay, let’s say I made a variation of the stuffing and instead of stuffing it in tomatoes, I put it in a loaf pan and made it a meatloaf. My mom’s recipe used only ground beef but I like the mix with ground pork as it makes the results more moist. As for the other ingredients (mushrooms, pepper), I just had them so I  figured I might as well put them in. I think it would be fair to say that my mom would never recognize her dish in this recipe if she tasted it.

As for the salad, it was a recipe my friend Kate told me about… I mean, she told me about a recipe she learned from a raw food chef that I believe resembles this. It involved kale and lime, avocado and other things. Last night when I was thinking about what I would bring for lunch the next day, I thought this salad would be great with the meatloaf that I just made. At least I had the kale, but I did not have lime to begin with so I substituted that with lemon. And I decided against the avocado and substituted that with bell pepper and for good measure I added cherry tomatoes. Well, to be honest, I forgot what other ingredients Kate mentioned in the original recipe and I was not going to call her in the middle of the night to ask her about it. When I decided to post the recipe I remade the salad, but then I ran out of cherry tomatoes so I used roma tomatoes instead. And bam! I just basically made a variation of the variation. See? Endless possibilities!

 Meat loaf with kale salad

For the meat loaf
1 pound of ground beef
1 pound of ground pork
1 medium sized onion, finely diced
4 white button mushrooms, finely diced
1/4 of a bell pepper, finely diced
4 cloves of garlic, finely diced
1 tsp of 21 seasoning salute from Trader Joe’s (you can substitute for other herbs or spices of your choice)
1 tsp of salt
2 Tbsp of oil

For the salad
3 kale leaves medium size
1 roma tomato, cut in cubes
1 bell pepper, cut in cubes (or the rest of the one you used for the meatloaf will do)
The juice of half of a lemon
1 Tbsp of extra virgin olive oil

Heat oven to 415°F. Place the ingredients for the meatloaf in a mixing bowl using and mix thoroughly. I like to use a potato masher to mix them or you can also just use your hands. Place the meat mix in a loaf pan (or a meatloaf pan if you have one). Bake for 35-40min.

Remove the kale leaves from the stems. Wash and dry them. Roughly cut them in pieces , not too small. Place in a bowl and add the lemon juice and the oil. Season with salt as needed. Toss the kale and make sure to rub the lemon-oil well into the leaves with your hands so there are well coated. Add the cut tomato and bell pepper. Toss to mix. It is best to prepare the salad in advance and let it macerate while the loaf is cooking. The lemon juice with macerate and soften the kale leaves so it is not so tough to eat.