Adventures in Cooking: Pastitio and Lasagna.....

[poltr1]

Occasionally, on weekends, I've taken to cooking in. We don't have to get the baby bundled up, go out in the cold, wait for a half hour (or more), and spend lots of money.

I don't cook on weeknights because by the time I come home, I'm ravenous, and so is my wife. We want to eat NOW.

Because it's only the two of us, I've taken to the idea of cooking a large batch and freezing most of the leftovers, so they don't go bad when they're languishing in the fridge, forgotten about. We often need to do this because most recipes serve more than 2. I often do the cooking while my wife is watching our daughter.

Here are two recent forays into the culinary world.

1/18/03: Pastitio. At last fall's Greek festival, I bought a cookbook of recipes compiled and collected from some of the families of the church. My wife throughly loves pastitio (a meat and pasta dish that loosely resembles lasagna without the tomato sauce), and had been disappointed a few times when she wanted some and the local Greek restaurant was sold out of it. This cookbook had three recipes for pastitio -- one served 24 (nope, way too much), another served 12 (hmm, maybe not), and the other served 10. I went with the recipe for the least amount of people.

I browned the meat and cooked the elbow macaroni. I got everything all together (which is tough to do because almost everything is cooking at once), until I got to the part of the recipe that calls for grated cheese. I'm Italian on my father's side, I grew up in an Italian family, and to me, "grated cheese" means either Romano or Parmesan. Well, the pastitio didn't turn out like we expected. It lacked that certain "zing". I should have used a Greek grating cheese, like Myzithra. A few days later, I found some at a local specialty store, grated it on top of some leftover pastitio, and sure enough, that was what was missing. I'm pencilling in the word "Myzithra" on the recipe, so I'll remember the next time I make it. I'll probably increase the amount of cinnamon and nutmeg as well. And if I can find a smaller baking dish, I'll cut the recipe in half.

2/22/03: Lasagna. My mother had a cookbook from a church in Olean, NY, that had a great recipe for lasagna al forno (baked lasagne). It was the recipe she used to make lasagna at some of our family gatherings of years past. During my last trip to visit my parents, I dutifully typed it into my laptop computer. I finally copied it to the main computer, formatted it, and printed it out.

I cheated a little bit -- instead of cooking the spaghetti sauce from scratch, I had a quart jar of Mamma DiSalvo's sauce (which is served at the local restaurant of the same name). Unfortunately, it has little onion pieces in it (which my wife doesn't like), and bits of tomato skin (which I don't care for). I brought the rest of ingredients in from the store, mixed it all up, and cooked it. I thought the lasagna turned out well, other than the sauce. I guess I'm used to my family's sauce recipe (which came from my grandmother). Which reminds me.....I want to make a batch in the crock pot, but I want to use up all the canned and bottled sauce I already have before I make a new batch.

Comments

[trektone.livejournal.com]

Now you've made me hungry. I've made "pastichio" which is probably the same as "pastitio" and the recipe I used called for two grated cheeses: Parmesan and feta. Maybe it's the feta that gives the zing, though too much or a highly-flavored type could be overpowering. While I've eaten mizithra/myzithra before, I've never cooked with it.