Yesterday Jeff and I made meatloaf, and it was quite frankly the best meatloaf I've ever had in my entire life. It wasn't terribly special in terms of what we put in it (ground beef, onions, a couple of eggs, ketchup, a little bit of spices), but it smelled heavenly in the oven, and it turned out absolutely perfect. We had it with mashed potatoes and creamed spinach, mmm. We also made another pumpkin pie yesterday evening and left it to cool overnight, and I'm looking forward to having some for an afternoon snack.
One thing I've been paying more attention to in the past months, mostly because of Jeff, is good ingredients. He got me buying organic food, both for health reasons and to support sustainable farming, and I do think the food is more flavorful and tastes better. I've still got some food that's not organic, like sugar and cake flour and pasta, but I've been gradually using it up and replacing it with organic foods. This week Jeff and I bought organic ketchup, flavored with fruit juice instead of refined sugar, and the difference between it and the cheap Safeway stuff I used before is amazing. I suspect that it's one reason for the meatloaf's deliciousness.
Sugar is one of Jeff's big diet peeves, for two reasons. First, the calories in refined sugar are completely empty, with no nutritional value at all; in fact, the digestion of sugar depletes the body of nutrients. Second, sugar is in everything these days, whether it really belongs or not. I certainly agree with him on the second point, and I believe him on the first, though I am less fanatic than he is. I've been using my non-organic, refined sugars in pumpkin pie the last couple of weeks, and Jeff hasn't complained, but my box of white sugar is now running out. To make him happy, I've replaced it with organic, minimally-processed sugars: rapadura and evaporated cane juice.
Now, I'm not quite sure what the difference is between rapadura and evaporated cane juice, other than that the rapadura is pale golden brown and the other is creamy almost-white. The difference between both of these and refined sugar is that they still have all or most of the nutrients from sugar cane. (Molasses, by the way, is a byproduct of the refining process which contains those nutrients, lots of flavor, and less glucose.) Normal brown sugar is just refined sugar with molasses added back in, and it's probably not much better than white sugar in terms of nutrition. In any case, I'm going to try these and see how I like them. I'm particularly interested in trying the rapadura in pumpkin pie, since it's supposed to have a delicate caramel flavor.
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