Gan Gan's Meatloaf

I've been in a very baking/cooking mood this week.  I've made both white chocolate and regular chocolate chip cookies, snickerdoodles (which I'll post about later), and on Wednesday night I made one of Bryan's favorites--my Gan Gan's meatloaf!

I was given the recipe as part of a bridal shower gift.  My mom's side of the family compiled a cookbook of favorite recipes for me.  It is one of my favorite gifts!

Gan Gan's recipe calls for:
1 pound of ground round
1 egg, beaten
1/2 cup of oatmeal
1/2 cup of ketchup
4 Tablespoons of brown sugar
1/2 an onion, chopped
1 Tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce
an optional 1 teaspoon of wine, vinegar or mustard

I generally leave the optional option out :-).  The very first thing to do is preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Next, I cut the ground round out of its package and dump it in a bowl.  Then I chop a medium sized white onion in half.  I put the smaller half in a ziplock bag and in the fridge, and then proceed to chop the larger half.  I call it "medium chopping" because you don't want the onion pieces big enough to interfere with the cohesiveness of the meatloaf, but you also don't want them to be too small to notice.

Next, I crack the egg into a separate bowl and beat it with a fork.  Then I measure out all the other ingredients and dump everything in the bowl with the meat.  I mix it all together with my hands until thoroughly combined.

After it's all thoroughly mixed, I dump in a bread baking pan and pat it down until it evenly fills the pan.  Stick the pan in the oven for 50 minutes, and once the time has passed you have a delicious main dish!  On Wednesday, I added baby red potatoes (stabbed with a fork and microwaved for 5 minutes) and SteamFresh frozen green beans.  All in all, it was a complete success :-).