Moussaka

The other day I cooked dinner with one of my flatmates and taught him how to make veggie moussaka. Generally I'm not very good at cooking to a recipe, even though it does give more, err, consistent results! I love recipes for giving me new ideas of flavour combinations or for learning a new technique but I've never made moussaka to a recipe. I based the moussaka we made on friday on the way my friend, one of the chefs where I work over the summer, makes it. It was soo DELICIOUS. Like seriously delicious. I was eating it going mmmm mmmm mmmmmmmm, it was good.

We're planning on having veggie moussaka at our wedding (it definitely says something about our priorities that the first thing we decided about our wedding was what we wanted to eat!), so I thought I should actually record what I put in this one so we can recreate it. Then I thought why not share the love, who doesn't want to make a yummy veggie moussaka!? So here goes:

1. Turn the oven on at around 220 degrees C.
   
2. Slice a medium sized aubergine (or eggplant if you're that way inclined) into widthway slices about half a centimetre thick. Place a layer of slices in the bottom of a colander and lightly sprinkle salt over them. Add another layer, add salt, and repeat until all of the slices are in the colander. Then put a plate on top and add a weight like some tins or a bottle of wine to squash the aubergine. This will remove some of the liquid in the aubergine so the slices are tender.
   
3. Chop two small onions (or one big one!), three large cloves of garlic and two sticks of celery.
4. Begin to fry the onions, garlic and celery in olive oil in a stew pot or wok, at a moderate heat so that the onions are browning very gently.
5. While the onions etc are frying roughly chop three portabello mushrooms, into pieces that are chunky but not more that bite sized.
6. Deglaze the pan by adding a good glug of red wine.
7. Add a large (800g) tin of peeled (or chopped) tomatoes, and a small (400g) drained tin of lentils, or if you're organised a comparable quantity of dried lentils that you've pre-cooked.
   
8. Throw in the mushrooms, then crumble a vegetable stock cube into the pan, add black pepper (liberally for me, but whatever you like!), paprika (again, liberally!), a pinch of cayenne pepper and a pinch of brown sugar (or whatever you have, honey is even better actually).
9. While you let the tomatoey pan simmer away you can begin on the topping, first set up a pan to lightly fry the aubergine slices. While this is warming rinse off the slices to remove the salt, then squeeze them in stacks to remove some more liquid. You can then batch fry them until they all have a little bit of colour on both sides. If the tomatoey pan is beginning to look fairly reduced and syrupy delicious you can turn it off.
   
10. Either simultaneously if you're hungry, or once the aubergines are done, you can begin on the white sauce for the topping. Add a knob of butter (I'd say around a heaped dessert spoon if I had to measure it) to a small sauce pan, melt.
11. While continuing to heat the pan cautiously add some plain flour (or sauce flour if you have it) and stir into the butter until it forms a ball that will be rolled around the pan without sticking.
12. Now this is the tricky bit. Add milk to your butter and flour ball, but very very slowly, I mean miniscule bits to start with, and keep stirring all the time, the heat should still be on but not too hot. The idea is to gradually make the ball into a liquid, but if you try to do this too quickly it will go lumpy. If you stop stirring the milk is likely to burn to the bottom of the pan, so just keep stirring!
13. Once your ball is a liquid add a couple more glugs of milk to make it fairly thin, something like the consistency of single cream.
14. Then you can add some grated cheese, two decent handfuls of cheddar does the trick, but parmesan is better if you have it, a mix is of the two is also yummy. If you have mustard adding a little bit at this stage will bring out the flavour of your cheese so you don't need to add as much. When you're grating, grate some extra to go on top of the moussaka.
    
15. Cook the sauce out for a little while, a couple of minutes or so, until it visibly thickens.
16. Now you're ready to assemble your moussaka. First pour the tomatoey mix into a casserole dish. Then layer your aubergine slices on top, don't worry if you have too many or too few, just double them up or spread them out depending on your dilemma. Now pour the cheese sauce on top. Finally sprinkle some cheese to taste on top, and some paprika on top of that if you like.
17. Pop in the oven for around half an hour, we put some potatoes in as well so we could have baked potatoes with our moussaka.
18. Eat, enjoy!

Yum. I'm getting hungry writing about it, a perfect friday night dinner, maybe I'll make it this week as well!