Asian Turkey Meat Loaf Muffins

It's been a  tiring week already and it's just Tuesday.  I hate it when the week starts out like this.  While I hear my nice comfy bed (and Pinterest) calling my name, I'm going to ignore them for a few moments and tell you about dinner tonight.  After the last two days which felt like a week, it was time to get in the kitchen and create something.

I got a chance to look at the latest Prevention Magazine  this past weekend and one of the meatloaf recipes caught my eye.  I have always been a meatloaf lover with my favorite having the tomato-ey, ketchup-ey sauce on top that gets all thickened up when you bake it.  My husband?  Not so much.   He's not a tomato-ey kind of guy at all.  Oh, he will eat it without complaint and compliment the meal because he's sweet like that; but, in my heart, I know it's not his favorite.  I digress.   This Asian meatloaf recipe appeared to be the perfect compromise.   It had the yummy Asian flavors that we both love so it promised to be full of flavor.  I would get my nice thick sauce on top while David would be spared the usual tomato-ey, ketchup-ey version.  The best of both worlds, right?   I thought so too.

Now this recipe looked delicious as it was written; but as things normally roll around here, I had to put my own twist to it if no other reason than to use what I had on hand.  The recipe called for  ground chicken; but, I happened to have some ground turkey breast so I grabbed a pound of that.  I didn't have my camera ready so you will have to suffer through my iPhone pics....

To that, I added some chopped garlic.  The recipe called for three cloves; however, when splitting the cloves apart, I actually pulled off five - three large ones and two smaller ones.  If 3 cloves of garlic is good, then 5 must be better.  Amen?

Next up: chopped scallions....

And grated fresh ginger.  It is smelling amazing up in here by this point. 

If it wasn't smelling delicious already, I started chopping the very fragrant cilantro.  I know there are those that just can't do cilantro; but, I am crazy about it.  Thankfully, my husband is too.

The recipe calls for Sesame Oil, Panko, Hoisin Sauce and Tamari.  I didn't have Tamari; but I did have a bottle of Ponzu that I wanted to use so I easily made that substitution.

Last but not least, no Asian recipe at my house would be complete without the addition of sriracha. I definitely could have added more if I had not been at the end of the bottle.  Note to self.....buy more sriracha.

A quick stir and into the muffin pan it goes.  I didn't want to heat the kitchen so I used a six cup muffin pan and baked them in the toaster oven.  The recipe says that it makes 6 servings.   At 1/4 cup (+/-) each, I got 10 muffins.  That's close enough for me.  

I didn't change this recipe up enough to completely  make it my own so I going to highly recommend that you add this to your menu plan (with my changes and substitutions, of course) and head over to Prevention Magazine and get the recipe.  You can find it here. 

The meatloaf was moist and flavorful and we absolutely loved it.  Meatloaf is comfort food for me and it seemed odd to not have potatoes with it.  I served it with grilled baby bok choy and steamed green beans and baby carrots.  Having the meatloaf in muffin form helped my portion control and the low carb sides went perfectly with this dish. 

After dinner we made a speedy one mile walk in the neighborhood and came back for dessert.  Homemade Lemon Sorbet (more about that in a future post) for David....

And fresh watermelon for me....