Best ever Moussaka - with a little bit of help!

Now, before going any further, if you've come here looking for the original version of my recipe for Moussaka and are aghast to find it has been replaced by this one - do let me know and I will reinstate it.  You see, in my opinion, this new recipe is such a totally different kettle o' lamb deliciousness, it quite outstrips the old recipe.  Although, having said that, this recipe carries an awful lot of the previous incarnation along with it - just with a few tweaks and twists that have made such a difference.  So anyway - to horse!  Or kitchen.  lol

You'll be wondering what makes the big difference.  Well, firstly, I've got a new way of preparing the aubergines that works so beautifully well.  Instead of brushing the aubergine slices with olive oil and having them absorb half a bottleful, I am now taking advantage of that wonderful thing, the low calorie cooking spray.  In my case, a 1 calorie coconut oil version.  Spray the tray, lay the aubergine slices on, spray each slice, sprinkle with salt and pepper and into the oven they go.  They come out beautifully toasty, sweet and soft without being greasy in the slightest - which of course, then cuts the amount of oil your Moussaka is dealing with.  Perfect.

Secondly, I've included some garlic.  Now don't go looking all horrified, what I'm looking for here is flavour and it's only one clove.  Some traditional Moussaka recipes ask for it, some shun it completely.  Believe me, it makes a difference so go for it.

My third big improvement is that I have been using a pre-prepared bechamel sauce, to which I add two egg yolks and a good amount of nutmeg, plus as much seasoning as is required.  Yes, I have a taste just to test how much seasoning to use.  Now if you're hale and hearty and able to make your own bechamel by all means be my guest and do so.  If, however, you're like me and a short cut to deliciousness can only result in your not feeling so trashed later on in the day, then buy some.  I heartily recommend Lidl's Italiamo Besciamella as being one that is a gorgeous texture and delicious flavour.  A great starting point for any white sauce!

Now comes the big discussion point.  To potato or not potato.  For me and for all that I love potatoes, they are not welcome in my Moussaka.  I reckon that potato was only included because the price of a) lamb and b) aubergines became prohibitive and to make the dish more of a meal, potatoes were introduced.  I can respect that - I've done things like that myself, over the years.  However, I can't help but think that a true Moussaka should be just meat (and sauce), aubergines and bechamel sauce with nutmeg & cheese.  However, if you're trying to feed a big family and sliced potatoes will help make your Moussaka go further, then use them.  (It helps to add them to the aubergines being baked in the oven to par-cook.  Makes sure they cook through in the Moussaka).

There are two ingredients that it is important you don't skip.  One is the wine - absolutely essential.  Two is the teaspoonful of mint jelly.  The sweetness of the jelly helps to round out the acidity of the wine and as we all know, mint and lamb are a combination made in heaven.

Now I've used Grana Padano cheese for my Moussaka, but that is by no means set in stone.  I would have used Kefalotyri if I could have found any, or Parmesan if my son didn't hate the stuff.  To be honest, I dare say a good mature Cheddar would do the trick as you don't use very much.  So, I shall leave the cheese up to your own taste - but don't leave it out!  It is essential for getting that beautiful golden crust on the finished article.

Yes, this recipe takes time and yes, it makes a prodigious amount of washing up, however you can easily combat both of those points by making the dish up to the point of putting it in the oven and set it aside (even overnight, if needs be!) until required.  (I make mine in the morning, ready for eating that evening).  You just pre-heat the oven and in it goes.  As for the washing up, well hopefully you'll have had time to deal with that in the meantime, making clean up after dinner itself a relatively simple matter.

Choices of things to serve alongside your Moussaka include garlic bread, chips (a.k.a. fries) and of course, the ubiquitous side salad or even better a Greek salad of tomatoes, cucumber, olives, red onion and feta cheese sprinkled with dried oregano.  Delicious.

Oh and another plus point (as if you needed another one), is that it freezes really well.  So make an enormous dish and freeze half for another day.  Can't do better than that!

MOUSSAKA (serves 4)

Ingredients : 

2 large aubergines, sliced thinly

low calorie cooking spray

sea salt

freshly ground black pepper

1 tbsp rapeseed oil
2 large onions, sliced

1 clove garlic, finely chopped
500g minced lamb

1 tsp ground cinnamon

half a tsp dried thyme
2 vine ripened tomatoes, diced
1 tbsp tomato puree

1 tsp of lamb stock powder (or 1 lamb stock cube)

200ml red wine

1 tsp mint jelly
500ml carton of Lidl Italiamo Besciamella (or other equivalent)

2 egg yolks
1 tsp grated nutmeg

grated Grana Padano cheese for sprinkling.

Method :

Preheat the oven to 180degC/350degF/gas mark 4.

Line two large baking trays with silver foil and spray with cooking spray.  Place the aubergine slices onto the baking tray and spray liberally with cooking spray.  Sprinkle with sea salt & black pepper then bake for 20 minutes or until they feel cooked through when a knife is inserted. They should hopefully have some browned areas, which adds to the flavour.  Set aside to cool.

Heat the rapeseed oil in a large frying pan and add the onions & garlic. Cook gently for around 15 minutes, stirring often, until golden and soft. Remove from the pan and set aside.

Add the minced lamb to the pan and fry on the highest heat, stirring often, until browned and slightly caramelised. Remove some of the fat that will have accumulated (if necessary) and return the onions & garlic to the pan.

Reduce the heat to moderate and add the cinnamon, thyme, tomatoes and tomato puree.  Stir to combine and cook on for another 2-3 minutes.  Add the lamb stock powder or cube and the red wine.  Bring everything to the boil and cook briskly, stirring often, until the red wine is reduced by half. Season with the mint jelly, salt and pepper to taste.

Using a lasagne dish, layer the aubergine and mince, starting with mince.  You should have sufficient for three layers of mince and three of aubergine, finishing with an aubergine layer.

Tip the bechamel sauce into a bowl and stir in the egg yolks, nutmeg and some black pepper.  Pour the sauce evenly over the top of the aubergine & lamb mixture and level the top surface.  Sprinkle liberally with the grated Grana Padano cheese.

Now, at this stage, you can leave the Moussaka to one side until you are ready to bake it.  It will cope with being refrigerated until the next day, if you so wish.

Making sure the oven is pre-heated to 180degC/350degF/gas mark 4 and the Moussaka is at room temperature, bake the Moussaka for around 45-50 minutes, until the top surface is golden and the edges are bubbling.  Remove from the oven and allow to settle for some 5-10 minutes prior to serving.

Serve with chips (fries) or garlic bread and a side salad with olives and feta cheese.

Printable version

Fish, beef, lamb, chicken, pork - is there anything we've left out?

Looking at this week's menu plan, purely by accident, I think we've about covered all the main meat groups one way and another!

Last week's meal plan went out of the window at regular intervals and we managed to have, instead, a takeaway curry, pie & chips and chicken & chips (with a kebab for hubby).  I'm not really sure how that happened, but it can't be allowed to continue!  For one thing, we wouldn't be able to afford it!

The first recipe to be jettisoned was the Couscous stuffed peppers, which I just lost all enthusiasm for.  Anyway, my prize voucher from The Heart of India was burning a hole in my psyche and I just SO wanted to use it - so we did.  I had a gorgeously tender and non-fatty Lamb Biryani which comes with a lovely vegetable curry.  Hubby had a Chicken Pathia and son & heir had a Chicken Korma.  We all shared a Sag Bhajee and a Keema Naan and it was absolutely glorious.  I'm not sure when we'll be able to have another, but I can't wait!  With the prize voucher for £25 to use, it only cost us around £4 which was brilliant.

The next recipe that got the heave-ho was the Sherried Chicken Casserole.  This was part of a swap with the Smoky Pork & Bean Wraps because we were trying to fit the best meal to match up with an extra guest as son & heir had invited a friend for a sleepover.  I was intending on giving him the chicken dish and so swapped the two dishes around - only for us to forget to buy the Smoked Paprika when we'd gone to the shop specifically for it!  We got rather distracted by other things and the old grey cells aren't what they used to be, you know.  By the time we realised the lack of paprika, it was too late to do anything about anything, so we had a quick trip to the chippie instead.  What a shower!

The poor old Five Spice Beef noodles was the next one to go, as son & heir decided to stay at a friend's house for tea that night and it was just easier to go out and get something, rather than cook.  Hubby is always in the market for a kebab, so I got some chicken & chips.

So - you can see - all this has got to stop or we'll be completely spherical and skint!

This week's meals - which we WILL stick to (there, I've said it so it's got to happen now) are : 

 Tues : Fish pasta

Weds : Minced Beef Curry, vegetable curry and rice

Thurs : Sandwiches

Fri : Moussaka with tomato salad

Sat : Sherried chicken with broccoli & crusty bread

Sun : Beef Olives, roast potatoes & parsnips, Yorkshire puddings, carrots & savoy cabbage

Mon : Barbecue Sausage & Red Pepper with mashed potatoes, peas & sweetcorn.

  

A number of those meals require explanation, so I'll do my best.

Yesterday's Fish Pasta was something of a disaster for poor hubby.  Before I go any further, I will say that I liked the dish.  However, I was in the minority.

It all stems back to when I had a yearning to use papardelle pasta with the Pork Ragu that I make.  Don't ask me why papardelle - I just had a fancy for it.  Somehow (and I'm not too sure how), this got translated into hubby volunteering to make a fish pasta dish with the papardelle (which we'd sourced in Sainsbury's and bought by then).  He had planned to make a dish using a lesser-known type of fish (and we sourced and visited a Fishmonger, but they were closed, unfortunately - which was the start of the dish going wrong) in a Buerre Noisette sauce with lemon, capers and dill.  Sounded flipping lovely, to me.  With no fishmonger available, we were stuck with whatever Asda could supply - which wasn't much.  Hubby had got sidetracked a little by smoked fish - smoked trout in particular.  However, he couldn't get acceptable trout (never mind smoked) and opted for smoked salmon pieces.  Can you see how the expectation for the dish is being scuppered at every turn?  Well, unfortunately, we were too caught up in trying to make it happen to notice.

As he was cooking the meal, he began to lose faith in his vision of the Beurre Noisette and how it would marry up with the smoked salmon - and I think he has a point.  I suspect we should have swapped out to something totally different at the point that the fishmonger was shut - but then hindsight is a wonderful thing.  What he landed up with was nothing like his original vision, which was such a shame - but something of a learning experience, I think!

Keema Mutter - a lot to live up to!

So, tonight's curry will be something of a return to more pedestrian dishes - but hopefully, dishes that will soothe the savage breast and comfort the thwarted creativity with delicious and exotic curry spices.  I'm basing the Minced Beef Curry on the Keema Mutter (which is lamb) recipe and hopefully it will be just as nice.  I absolutely love a vegetable curry and it will be nice to have one as a side dish, along with the plain rice.  It also gives the sugar snap peas something to do, now they're not being used for the noodle dish!

We're visiting my parents on Thursday and if we're out for either lunch or dinner (not sure which, at the moment), sandwiches will do for whichever meal we'll need to provide at home.

My Moussaka - along different lines, but still nice!

Hubby is back in the kitchen on Friday, making a Moussaka

Hooray!  The Sherried Chicken makes its come-back on Saturday.  I was quite determined not to lose this recipe altogether as I've been really looking forward to it and so back onto the menu list it went.  The crusty bread we bought for it last week is still good as we bought home-bake petit pain rolls that keep for ever.  I suspect that the broccoli will meet its Waterloo in the vegetable curry, so that's probably the only ingredient that will require buying again for the recipe, so it's all good (as they say).

Hubby is back in the kitchen again on Sunday, making a dish that he's been craving for - quite literally - years.  Way back in the seventies, Beef Olives were all the rage at dinner parties around the country.  It is one of those dishes that has taken a back seat along with the prawn cocktail and sole veronique, but hubby has every intention of it making a delicious reprise on our Sunday dinner table.  Fingers crossed that the butcher has the right kind of Braising Steak, or we might end up with sausages instead!  

Speaking of sausages, if we can find some that might meet my exacting sausage requirements (a sausage with flavour and some fat content - hubby tells me that Sainsbury's should be able to answer this brief), I'll be using up the remainder of the Levi Roots Reggae Reggae sauce on the sausages and red pepper (left over from the abortive stuffed pepper recipe).  I really like the idea of baking the sausages in the barbecue sauce, then pairing them up with mashed potato, peas and sweetcorn.  In fact, the mental picture is making my mouth water!  It will be a simple dish that's exactly right for a Monday evening.

So there you have it.

Now, as for extra cooking ventures, well my first go at Watercress Soup went down the drain regrettably.  I hate waste - but that really was horrid.  Something happened in the blitzing that caused the mascarpone to suddenly split and I wound up with great globs of cheesy fat with bits of smashed watercress sticking to them, floating on the surface of the soup.  Not nice at all.  Even with those bits sieved off, it was poor.  Very poor.  So that's that one tried and rejected.

The next one is an intriguing mix of crab and watercress in a warm soup, for which we will need to get ourselves back down to the Fishmunglers.  Fingers crossed, he'll be open this time!

Apart from that, I have an ever-growing desire to bake a cake of some sort.  Watch this space!

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