Pesto stuffed meatloaf

Meatloaf is a pretty standard meal, but there's a lot of interesting ways to jazz it up and add in unexpected flavors. Recently we tried making a stuffed meatloaf that uses an ingredient you wouldn't normally associate with this staple dinner - pesto!

We used ground pork, but of course ground beef would also work just fine. To start, we make a batch of our homemade marinara sauce, which will be used in place of the usual ketchup topping. We layer some sauce in the bottom of a baking dish before dividing our seasoned ground pork in half. The first half is spread out in a rectangle shape in the pan, then covered in a layer of delicious pesto.

Unlike with our recent blog, we didn't make the pesto from scratch this time around - this one is store bought instead.

Again going non-traditional for meatloaf, next we put on a layer of fresh spinach to add another fun green vegetable.

Spinach, pesto...what's it missing? Cheese of course! Let's take this up a notch by slicing some pepper jack and layering it on top (you could always shred it instead, but this was less messy and easier to work with as we added the various layers).

Then we add another layer of spinach and slather on some more pesto before we're ready to top this towering monstrosity.

Form the second half of the ground meat over the layers until it's all completely covered.

We topped the meat with more marinara sauce and popped it in the oven. After about an hour we get this beautiful stuffed meatloaf. It looks like we didn't fully cover a small side though, as some cheese has escaped!

Here's a look at the inside with the layers of spinach, pesto, and cheese all baked together.

Slice it up and serve with whatever sides you have on hand - we went with stuffing and a baked potato, but pasta or salad would be great as well.

This was a huge success and is going to become part of our reuglar dinner rotation, but we're also looking forward to trying this in different ways, such as using ground chicken and swapping out some of the fillings or even the sauce. Provolone with bacon and mushrooms would be great, and there's no reason it couldn't have an alfredo or cheese sauce instead of marinara.