So I've hesitated to jump into my food swapping tendencies on this blog, because I am certainly not comparable to all the wonderful chiefs crafting their food masterpieces and then giving their treasured original recipes with their beautifully styled food shots on their wonderfully scrumptious blogs....BUT! over the summer and now into the fall I've so thoroughly enjoyed a little experiment I've been practicing with a few neighbors. We each (3 families) cook one meal a week to share and disperse and in return, get 2 nights of wonderful meals delivered to our door. It's turned out to be a fantastic arrangement. It certainly helps that we all live within blocks of each other (though, admittedly, I still usually drive for my delivery because I'm usually running a teensy bit late. I'm working on that.) Sam (the love of my life--via neil clark warren) more often than not, comes to the kitchen at the nick of time to help pull off a wonderful cooking adventure.
This week was moussaka. We recently traveled to LA to visit my dear sister and fell in love with this wonderfully charming greek restaurant, where I had my first bite of moussaka. mmmm! So next on the food rotation was an attempt to make atleast something resembling this fantastic dish....and it was a hit!
We used this recipe as a base, excluding the process of frying beef in butter. I'm all about getting fat in the diet, but lordy, that's a bit much, even for me. We also grilled the eggplant instead of frying and added 2 eggs to the béchamel sauce according to some of the comments below (we actually separated the eggs and beat the whites...which I guess had a souffle effect on the top layer, which summarily sank as I rushed it out of the oven to get to my hungry food swap pals after snapping a photo of their dinner right before covering it and bagging it up, just for you, dear 2 readers of my blog) I'd probably skip the egg separation next time...I'm way too rough for a successful souffle.
And as a side we just threw together the traditional greek salad, with dressing: olive oil + lemon juice + oregano. Sam ventured into our garden to get the oregano. I was happy to learn it was still alive, but Sam also reported that it was so alive to be crowding some of our other plants. (he chose to express this by saying the oregano was "getting all up in our other plants' bidness"....I thought this was precious).
And what did we receive this week in the food swap? Oh how I wish I had pictures (and plates!) to share. It was glorious. This wonderful salad (my personal favorite of the week, and so beautiful and so seasonal) + pesto pasta, and turkey chili, cornbread and fresh veggies. yum!