Name: Gluten Free Italian Mini Meat Loaves
Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 30 min
Total time: 40 min
Yield: 12 people
Ingredients: 1 1/4 pounds organic grass fed ground beef; 1/3 cup gluten free panko; 1/2 cup mozzarella cheese; 1 bulb fresh green garlic (thinly sliced); 1 large egg; 1/2 teaspoon salt; 2 tablespoons fresh basil (thinly sliced)

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These mini Italian gluten free meat loaves may look like cupcakes, but they are a savory and delicious dinner idea. Your kids will love these, even when they realize these meat loaves are healthy!

This easy dinner recipe would have been a perfect April Fool’s joke for my family….but I am often behind the times because it’s already May. These mini meat loaves looked so plain, and quite frankly quite ugly sitting on their plate.

I couldn’t resist making these little meat loaves to look just like cupcakes.

I wanted to see what my kids would think. Would they eat it?? This has all of the classic ingredients of a fabulous trick to play on my family.

Vegetables…check. Hidden sources of nutrition…check. Looks like a dessert…check.

Taste? Lets not go there yet…but if you insist, my kids gobbled this gluten free meat loaf up. Even my picky eater loved them. The secret was lots of cheese. I may even try to make this meat loaf recipe with bacon next time too. You can freeze this recipe and thaw out the loaves as needed so feel free to make a lot. (The mashed potatoes won’t freeze on top of the muffins, so you may want to make that when you thaw them out.)

(*If you love to hide veggies in your cooking, give these Gluten Free Acorn Squash Caramel Cookies or Gluten Free Butternut Squash Caramel Cake Bars a try!)

Green Garlic

Spring is my favorite time for green garlic. Green garlic is garlic before it the inside cloves become defined. This is usually only available for a couple of months a year. This green garlic is the last of the bunch I got from our CSA. It is almost on the border of being full on garlic, but not quite.

How to make gluten free meat loaf:

I chopped up the green garlic, added the gluten free panko, egg, fresh basil, and mozzarella cheese.

Spread it out in a muffin tin to bake. Whip mashed potatoes and you can put it on top to look like your frosting.

Unfortunately, nobody was fooled for long. My son really dug in and enjoyed this new way to eat a meat loaf. My picky one…well, lets just say her teenaged palate was not impressed. More for everyone else who loved them 🙂 .

Click here to see all of the meat recipes on this blog.

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Tools You Need To Make This Recipe:

Muffin pan: This is the easiest way to get those cute cupcake shapes for these meat loaves.
Electric mixer: My favorite way to whip up potatoes so they are creamy and fluffy! This is the brand I use. I also like that it has dough hooks and a whisk attachments.