Cultivated a moussaka recipe.
Moussaka is a mostly eggplant based recipe which involves layers of flavours of various vegetables. When you take a mouthful through several layers you want to experience several flavours at once. Which means that you want the several vegetable parts cooked in flavourful ways so that they still hold their original form, but also can be eaten with ease. This dish commonly is made with a meat filling but I chose to make a vegetarian version.
I happen to know a few of the flavours and vegetables I like already so I picked those as the layers (after looking at a few recipes online).
Ingredients:
- 1 jar of tomato-pasta sauce
- 1 large eggplant
- 1 zucchini
- 1 tennis-ball sized brown onion
- 700g of sliced mushrooms
- 250g potato
- garlic
- olive oil
- truffle oil
- pepper + salt
- butter
- cornflour
- 750ml milk
- shredded cheese
- breadcrumbs
- lazagne sheets
Prep:
each of the onion, zucchini, eggplant, potato and mushrooms need cooking. How you do that is up to you. It’s especially exciting if each of them has a unique flavour.
Once you have approximately the flavour, each ingredient gets added as a layer to the final dish.
Here is how I did my layers:
- Pasta sauce on the bottom, followed by a lazagne sheet and some pasta sauce on top. The sauce will soak into the sheets and make a soft base for the dish.
- Onions
fried in olive oil (simple flavour, good base) - Eggplant
slice them thin (1/4cm or thinner), lay them on an oven tray with some olive oil and truffle oil, bake for around 15mins @ 180c to lightly cook through. - Zuccini
Similar to the eggplant, some herbs on top, baked with light drizzle of olive oil. Add pepper as needed. - Pasta sauce and Lazagne sheet again
- Mushroom
Fried, with garlic. (they will shrink) the earlier you add the garlic the weaker it will be. If you want powerful garlic, add it just as you finish frying. - Potatoes
I sliced mine as thin as I could then microwaved them to cook them. This is very lazy. but it works. A better way to cook them would be baked or boiled with butter/cream or any other flavour that you like. - white sauce
- melt 2 tablespoons of butter in a pot
- Take it off the heat, and add two heaped tablespoons of cornflour and mix till the cornflour is a paste with the butter.
- Add 1-2 cups of milk (optional: cream) and stir to dissolve the cornflour
- Put back on the heat for 10mins and stir so that the sauce thickens.
- Cheese
For delicious meltyness - breadcrumbs
For extra crunch.
Bake for around 30mins at 180c or until the cheese is crispy. All of the ingredients are pre-cooked (except for the lazagne sheets) so this step is mostly to bring the flavours together, melt the cheese and get the lazagne soft.
Serves 10, more or less depending on the size of your vegetables.
Also is delicious.
Meta: takes 45mins to prepare + 15-30mins in the oven to melt the cheese,
Writing this down took 15mins. After some feedback, rewriting this took 20 minutes.