Salsa Meatloaf with Tequila Canned Beans

“There is nothing like a visitor from another continent to confuse you about your own homeland…One night an Indian friend came to dinner…He asked me to help him figure out American cooking, at which point I drew a blank. He said: “I would like to cook some American dishes, but it is hard for me to tell just what American food is.”

-Laurie Colwin: “How To Cook Like An American”

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In the three decades since Colwin pondered the definition of American cooking, lemongrass, miso, tahini, pomegranate molasses, and bok choi have all become commonplace on supermarket shelves. Salsas and hot sauces require entire aisles. Fresh loaves of bread sit alongside piles of tortillas, giant oval naan, and newspaper-sized packages of lavash. My refrigerator holds three different bottles of soy sauce: dark, light, and an expensive artisanal brew, sprinkled sparingly at table.

Let’s not even get started on olive oils, vinegars, or salt varieties.

Urban consumers have become blasé about this wealth of choices. We have come to expect it, even demand it.

This isn’t about expensive or fancy food. It’s about the food people in America eat.

American food.

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This Mexican-influenced meatloaf comes to the IK via Jacqueline Higuera McMahan, a journalist and cookbook writer. By mincing carrot, pepper, scallion, and salsa, McMahan brightens an all-too-often-beige meal, making it colorful on the plate and in the mouth. Serve doctored black beans alongside–brightened here with tomatillo–and you’ve got a meal that’s impossible to stop eating.

The IK has doctored beans before, and this time round wasn’t much different, recipewise. Some ground New Mexico chile was left over from the meatloaf recipe, hanging around with nothing to do.

So we gave it a reason for being, tossing it into a sauté pan with olive oil and garlic. A goodly amount of fresh lime juice was added in. Some leftover tomatillos were husked, washed, quartered, then permitted to greet their friends garlic and lime. The beans emerged from a can after significant struggle.

Well, more accurately, the can put up a fight. You’d think a woman with carpal tunnel and various other afflictions, all of them impacting her arms in screamingly painful ways, would have an automatic can opener. Nope. Not for nothing did she name this blog the insufficient kitchen.

So this can of black beans, it put up one hell of a fight. Your heroine retrieved the paring knife kept for just such eventualities. Every kitchen should have a knife like this, a garbage-y knife kept expressly for prying open wayward bean cans or books wrapped in acres and acres and acres of tape (surely you get these too?), as if the contents were a rare piece of Wedgewood and not some crummy paperback.

So the IK goes at the bean can, rocking the knife point beneath the snagging bit of lid refusing to free itself from the can. She’s careful, because a tetanus shot is not in her plans, and lo, the damned thing snaps free. And black bean goop splatters everywhere: the curtains, the windowsill, the IK’s hair.

The IK, she has a lot of hair. Maybe you weren’t aware of this. Her whole life, she’s had a lot of hair. And for whatever reason, her meds make her hair grow like crazy. So she has even more hair. With black bean goop in it.

It’s not exactly a fashion look, even in the Bay Area.

Yea verily, she did curse, though not as much as she last Tuesday.

Doctoring beans concluded with the additions of salt and tequila. Did your hostess drink any? Do you have to ask?

Moving along the meatloaf (note: notes are covered in black bean goop spatter…on first page of a new notebook, no less).

You as meatloaf pilot have a great deal of latitude in this recipe, determining which meats will comprise your loaf, controlling onionization levels (onionization will not be found in the OED. We understand each other, oui?) and spicing.

This recipe calls for salsa. We used leftover tomatillo sauce from Rick Bayless’s Tomatillo Braised Pork Loin, which, as noted, stand alone beautifully as a salsa. Because the IK loves spicy food, we doctored it with a few slices of serrano pepper and some fresh raw tomatillo, but you need not do any of this. You can run on down to the store, buy your favorite salsa, and dump it right on in.

Do not be put off by the raw meatloaf, which may appear watery, loose, and  enormously unwieldy. Unlike, say, our nation, it will come together while cooking. In terms of yield–about two pounds–our household of two rather meager eaters tackled this enthusiastically. So don’t fret. If you celebrate American Thanksgiving, are expecting out-of-town guests and need something to feed them besides the day-of bird, salsa meatloaf is one idea, as it works at any temperature, can be seved in sandwiches or plated, and provided you use gluten-free breadcrumbs, can feed just about anyone.

You’re wondering about the cilantro. It’s artfully concealing the crack where the IK checked doneness. To paraphrase Julia Child, a little parsley, or, in this case, cilantro, fixes everything. (2021: those were the days.)