A Fail in Cookery

Have you ever made meat loaf with cherrios? Or raisins? Or cinnamon? I hadn't, until today.

This came about bit by bit, I knew that we had plenty of potatoes and ground meat so I figured I would make potatoes and meatloaf. Thing is, however, everyone knows that meatloaf needs bread crumbs, we didn't have any bread but I was going to use the coffee cake left over from breakfast instead. That was all dandy except for a slight problem, someone ate those leftovers. ;)
I pondered for a while and then figured I'd use cherrios. Cherrios are, after all, small and nearly tasteless. They get their flavor from the milk they soak up, I needed them to soak up the meat juices. It sounded like it would work, right?

When I went to get the potatoes and ground meat out of the basement I found a bag of sliced almonds and I thought that almonds in meat loaf didn't sound too out there so I grabbed those, too.

I wasn't all that eager to totally make this meat loaf up so I--can you guess?--searched the ever-helpful Google for a meat loaf recipe that included almonds. I found one that sounded to me like a bunch of Southwestern nonsense but I figured I would try it anyway.

I multiplied the ingredients by four, copied them onto a paper, and got to cookin'.

3 eggs (because we didn't have four)
1 1/2 cups plain cherrios (more or less, I don't measure if I don't have to. :P This was instead of bread crumbs, if I do this again I will put in the 3 cups the recipe called for)
1/4 cup ketchup (the recipe actually called for a 3/4 cups salsa but we didn't have any. I'm not sure exactly how much I put in, it was just a few squirts because I like to go easy on ketchup)
1/2 cup raisins (roughly, I just dumped in the last of the raisins out of the opened bag in)
1/2 cup sliced almonds (this is the measurement that I can hardly began to guess at the exact amount of. The original recipe called for toasted, chopped almonds but we didn't have those)
2 teaspoons onion powder (the recipe called for a 1/4 cup chopped onions but we only had a fourth of an onion in the fridge and I didn't feel like bothering with it, I just dumped in plenty of the powder)
(The recipe called for sugar here but I left that completely out.)
2 teaspoon salt (I did measure this one :P )
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon (I just eyeballed this, it is hard to grind the cinnamon into a measuring spoon so I usually just do what I think looks appropriate)
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves (I also measured this one. I love to use ground cloves, it's such a pretty colored powder)
5 pounds ground turkey, thawed

I mixed this thoroughly and dumped it in two pans of two different sizes and then put a little ketchup on the top (the recipe called for more salsa but, like I said, we didn't have any). I cooked it at 400 degrees for an hour and a half.

It tasted okay I thought, the raisins were a little weird and I'm not the biggest fan of meatloaf.

The fail: it was burnt. Very burnt. Next time I will not cook it for the 15-30 minutes more than necessary that I cooked it for.