Moussaka with bake-at-home petit pains
I don’t have much to say about today: I woke up in pain several times overnight (and often with the duvet mostly on the floor beside the bed: I need to tie it down to stop it escaping!) and have continued to experience pain throughout the day. My left foot feels like I have a bad burn across the top of my big toe, the skin sore and tight, and both feet feel as if I’m wearing too small socks. I’m also getting the “invisible people with needles” feeling in my fingers, although that’s just annoying in comparison to the sometimes tear-inducing pain in my feet.
Mum opted out of church today and regretted it almost instantly: without the stimulation of being outside the house in the company of multiple people, she has been having more lapses in memory, and getting increasingly frustrated as words repeatedly elude her.
Of course the best thing to do when you’re stressed, tired, wobbly on your feet, and in constant pain is… to cook a multi-stage recipe? Maybe not – I’m now even more tired, and have pain in both feet, and I made a fairly major error in the cooking of the meat sauce (I left it to simmer and it stuck to the bottom of the pan, leaving the sauce with a distinctly bitter, burnt flavour: mum said she couldn’t taste it, but I definitely could).
I was going to share the recipe for the moussaka, but it was cooked in my usual ‘throw stuff in the pan’ style, learnt from my dad1, so it’s not going to be recreatable by anyone, even me.
As a rough outline, the meat sauce was frozen lamb mince (from Iceland: I hadn’t tried it before and was pleasantly surprised by how lean and un-watery it was), crunchy onions (as I realised at about 3am this morning that we were out of both fresh and frozen onions: these are meant for salads, but worked well as an emergency substitution), garlic, nutmeg, mixed herbs, tomato puree, tinned tomatoes, a little bit of sugar, and a chicken stock pot. Leave to simmer, but stir regularly so it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan and burn.
Then make a simple white sauce – melt butter, stir in some flour to make a paste and cook briefly, add milk and heat, stirring regularly, until thick – and flavour with cheese and a little bit of nutmeg. Allow to cool, then stir in a beaten egg.
Thinly slice an aubergine and fry slices in a frying pan until browned and cooked through. (Do them in batches so as to not over-crowd the pan.)
In a baking dish, layer up the aubergine slices and meat sauce, finishing with a layer of aubergine, then pour the egg and cheese sauce over the top. Sprinkle with a bit more cheese, and bake at gas mark 6 until the sauce has inflated and gone golden-brown.
Leave to cool for a few minutes before serving, ideally with a nice green salad: we didn’t have any left and it was a bit too rich on its own. Bread is an optional extra, but is nice to mop up the sauce.
Afterwards we had the rest of yesterday’s chocolate pudding, which mum declared “a nice bit of food”, although that was before she had to try and wash up the dish I made and cooked it in. 😬 (On my shopping list for next week are some latex-free washing up gloves so I can take an occasional turn at washing up; I can’t wear normal rubber gloves if I want the skin on my hands to remain in one piece, which I generally do!]
- Dad wanted to be a chef, but his father thought that cooking was a job for “women and [offensive term for gay men]” and threatened to disown his only son if he went into a cooking career. He therefore followed a different career path, but was a keen home cook and taught me a lot about cooking, with an emphasis on making it up as you go along and never making anything that you can make the same way again. ↩︎
Is it pineapple sponge today? 