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"Hey honey, I just found out I can make a meatloaf in the slow cooker," I told my husband.

"No offense," said my husband, "but we don't even really like the meatloaf you make the regular way."

I frowned. I couldn't be mad at him because I knew it was true. I did not have the greatest meatloaf reputation. When it came to making a dish as basic as meatloaf, I was something of a ground beef failure. No matter how diligently I watched the meat thermometer and poked my meatloaves to see if they were done, they still always came out dry and cakey. They weren't really meatloaves. They were more like meatbricks.

In my defense, I come from a long line of lousy meatloaf makers. My great-grandmother brought her lousy meatloaf recipe over from the old country. She called it "mitlof," which is loosely translated to mean "large ball of meat you chew forever." She passed the lousy meatloaf recipe on to my grandmother, who passed the lousy meatloaf recipe on to my mother, who handed it down to me. Not wanting to break with tradition, I persisted. But the next time I made my great-grandmother's mitlof when my kids came to visit, it was overwhelmingly panned by the meatloaf critics in my house.

"Sorry mom, but there isn't enough ketchup in the world to save this," said my son.

"You killed the meatloaf," said my daughter. "You're a meatloaf murderer."

"On the bright side, honey, if you had a couple hundred of these, we could use them to pave the driveway," said my husband.

"That bad, huh?" I replied.

"Yeah, but think of all the money we could save on stone pavers."

The writing was on the wall. It was clear I needed a meatloaf intervention.

So I asked a friend of mine who made world-renowned meatloaf, and she told me she made the most delicious, moist meatloaf in her slow cooker. I begged her for the recipe.

"It's so easy," she said. "You mix all the ingredients together, make a loaf shape, put it in the slow cooker on low, and in four hours it's done."

"That's it?" I said.

"Turns out great every time."

I was dubious but I'd never seen her kids boycott dinner on meatloaf night like mine had, or her dog walk away from the meatloaf when it fell on the floor like my dog did, or her get a cease-and-desist notice from the Health Department like I did, so I decided to give it a try.

I followed all her instructions for making the meatloaf, lined my slow cooker, then added the loaf and hit start.

Without being chained to the oven to keep checking on the meatloaf, I went out for a few uninterrupted hours of shopping. Drunk with meatloaf freedom, I hit up the bookstore and bought several recipe books for slow cookers. I went to the cookware store and bought some new oven mitts that didn't have burn marks on them. And I went to the drugstore to buy a bottle of antacid ... just in case.

Four hours later I got home and ran to the slow cooker to check out my delicious, new, juicy meatloaf.

I yanked off the top and peered in.

As I stared down at my meatloaf, I realized I had forgotten one crucial step in the slow cooker recipe:

Plug it in.

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Tracy Beckerman is the author of the Amazon Bestseller, "Barking at the Moon: A Story of Life, Love, and Kibble," available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble online! You can visit her at www.tracybeckerman.com.

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