It made me think of a joke Himself used to tell. He always told it about an Italian construction worker because he liked to use the Italian accent, but it could be anybody.

Every day the construction worker sits with his buddies, opens his lunch box and curses the peanut butter sandwich he finds. “I’ma hate a peanut butter sandwich,” he says. Every day he says, “Mama Mia, another peanut butter sandwich. I’ma hate a peanut butter sandwich.”

Eventually his buddies can’t stand it any more, so one of them says, “Why don’t you ask your wife to make you some other kind of sandwich?”

“I’ma no married,” the Italian says. “I’ma make-a my own peanut butter sandwich.”

Me, I hate meatloaf. I don’t know anybody who really does like it, but l keep making it and so does everybody else I know. I think we do it because it seems like meatloaf should be good, and we keep believing that, if we try long enough, eventually we’ll come up with a good one.

Once, in another life, when I had a radio show called “The Wife Saver,” I was trying so hard to find a good meatloaf recipe I ran a contest. Many people sent recipes. I tried them all. In retrospect, it’s amazing Himself wasn’t telling a meatloaf joke instead of peanut butter sandwich. Maybe he was trying to make the point in a subtle way. You think?

The number of variations on meatloaf boggle the mind. The winner in my contest had deviled ham, ketchup and buttermilk in it. It wasn’t particuarly good, but it was unusual.

Meatloaf fillers vary a lot, too. Crackers. Bread crumbs, oatmeal, wheat germ. Not all good, but interesting.

I’ve been through all kinds of cookbooks looking for meatloaf recipes. An old cookbook from the Stroudsburg, Pa., Presbyterian Church Circle called for crackers as a filler and a can of tomato soup for sauce. That was truly awful. So was the one with oatmeal and canned mushroom soup.

One of Julia’s recipes wraps a row of hard boiled eggs in the center. Trying that one made me realize I don’t much like hard boiled eggs, either.

A recipe in a health food cookbook I have includes a lot of chopped cabbage that was supposed to make the meatloaf juicy but just made it cabbage-ey.

I did make a meatloaf with chopped fresh mushrooms, grated carrots and homemade bread crumbs in it, baked with strips of bacon on top and basted with red wine. I was trying for a meatloaf version of beef bourgenon. The meatloaf was quite tasty but I had heartburn for two days after I ate it.

The meatloaf I brought to work Friday was pretty basic — beef, pork, bread crumbs, onion — too boring to bear. And the slaw wasn’t much help because I don’t much like it, either. Nobody really does — same as meatloaf.

But I thought I’d figured a way to have a better lunch when I traded meatloaf sandwiches with someone in the newsroom who had tried something more exotic. She said her recipe used chopped olives, tomato sauce, bechamel sauce and eggplant, sort of a meatloaf version of moussaka.