Kangaroo Moussaka

The grocer had a special on aubergines (not very seasonal but at a dollar each, grown in Australia, how can one resist?) and I really wanted to make moussaka. Unfortunately, the only thing less seasonal than aubergines at the moment is lamb! Neither the butcher nor the supermarket had any lamb mince, nor were willing to make any. So I thought -- why not try a kangaroo moussaka? The meat has a similar gaminess, and it's a more environmentally-friendly option in this country.  It's also a healthier option as it's generally leaner than lamb.If you're making this outside Australia, of course feel free to use lamb mince, or a mixture of beef and pork if you prefer.

One thing that's a little off-putting about the kangaroo mince is that it doesn't smell nearly as good early on in the cooking, but after 45 minutes of simmering, it suddenly disintegrates and becomes just as if not more tasty than lamb. So stick with it, it'll work out in the end!

I started with this recipe and modified it to suit my own tastes. I really prefer having potatoes separate to the moussaka, for contrast -- baked or mashed, either way. If you need to feed more than six people, but don't want to / can't buy fractionally more kangaroo mince (it comes in 1kg packs in my supermarket), feel free to bulk out the moussaka with a couple of grated carrots, or a cup of cooked lentils.

Ingredients

• 1 large or two small brown onion, finely chopped
• 6 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped or crushed
• 1kg kangaroo mince
• 2 carrots, cleaned and grated or a cup of cooked lentils (optional -- use if you need to feed more people)
• 1 stick celery, finely diced
• 1 tsp ground cinammon
• 2 bay leaves
• 1/2 cup dry white wine
• a tin of chopped tomatoes
• 3 large eggplants (aubergines)
• olive oil
• 1 small handful flat leaf parsley, chopped
• 2 tsp dried oregano
• 120g butter
• 1 cup plain flour
• 4 cups warm milk
• 1 bay leaf
• ground or freshly grated nutmeg

Method

Heat a little olive oil in a non stick pan and gently saute the onion until starting to soften. Add the garlic and cook until fragrant. Add the mince, breaking it up with a wooden spoon. Cook the mince until it loses all its water and begins to brown. Add the diced celery. If using, add the carrot or lentils. Add the cinammon, bay leaf, herbs and wine; stir and deglaze the pan, then add the tin of tomato and simmer for 45 minutes.

Meanwhile, grill or barbeque the eggplants, brushed with olive oil, until soft and golden on both sides. Also, make a bechamel sauce: melt the butter in a pyrex bowl, in the microwave, then stir in the flour. Gradually whisk in the milk, drop in the bay leaf and nutmeg, then microwave for five minutes, stirring every minute. The sauce should thicken.

Set the oven temperature to 180C. In a large rectangular dish, alternate layers of eggplant and mince until the dish is nearly full. Check the bechamel and taste for seasoning. Spoon over the top and smooth it over with a spatula. The layer should be quite thick. Bake for 25-45 minutes or until it’s all golden and bubbly. Serve with mashed or baked potato, and steamed vegetables or Greek salad.

Open Moussaka

We had some nasu dengaku earlier in the week, but weren't hungry enough to eat the entire massive aubergine. Tonight I had a strong craving for the flavours of moussaka, but didn't want to leave the oven on for an hour and a half during peak electricity cost, nor wait that long to eat dinner. So I tried out a somewhat crazy idea: making all the bits of a moussaka but skipping the fattiest parts and the long baking time. It actually worked really really well! The only thing that made it difficult was that grilling the topping at the end makes the plate too hot to handle!

Ingredients:

...and it gets harder to take an attractive photo ;)

• half a large aubergine
• three potatoes
• one medium onion
• 300g lamb mince
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1/2 glass of red wine
• 2 tbsp tomato puree
• one tomato
• a small handful of parsley
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp allspice
• 2 tbsp butter
• 2 tbsp flour
• 150ml milk
• a bay leaf or two
• 1/2 slice of bread
• a small handful of grated cheddar

Slice the aubergine lengthwise into four, brush with oil and BBQ or grill for 4-5 minutes each side, until caramelised and tender. Scrub and cube the potatoes, then set boiling, and drain and mash when done.

Finely chop the onion and fry for five minutes, then crush in the garlic and add the lamb, and fry until the lamb goes brown, about 4 minutes. Finely chop the parsley and tomato and add, along with the wine, tomato puree, cinnamon and allspice. Stir and season, then cover and simmer for 20 minutes, until thickened and tasty.

Meanwhile, melt the butter, combine with the flour and gently whisk in the milk; drop in the bay leaves and microwave for 4-5 minutes, stirring every minute, until thickened. Blend the bread into breadcrumbs and combine with the grated cheese.

Assemble the moussaka by spreading a layer of mashed potato onto the bottom of the plate, then topping with the lamb mixture. Pour half of the white sauce onto the lamb mixture, add the cooked slices of aubergine, then top with the remaining white sauce. Sprinkle over the cheese and breadcrumbs. Grill for 1-2 minutes, until the breadcumbs are golden and the cheese has just melted.

Baked Celery and Salmon

After a Zumba class I was absolutely ravenous. Thankfully my husband had been slaving away over a hot stove, so a mere hour after I arrived home (during which I whinged almost constantly), a warming, nourishing and comfortingly bland (in a good way) dish of Nigel Slater origin appeared. The trick with this is to make sure you get the salt and pepper just right, and don't eat or drink anything with strong flavours at the same time, as all the flavours are milky and gentle. It's like a healthy version of macaroni & cheese. As usual, quantities are for two people.

Ingredients:

• half a head of celery
• half a small onion
• a bay leaf
• 100 ml milk
• 25g butter
• 1 heaped tbsp flour
• a handful of Parmesan or other cheese (experiment!)
• a small bunch of parsley
• a handful of rough breadcrumbs

Snap the celery into ribs and wash the root ends thoroughly. Put them in a wide saucepan (cut in half if yours is not wide enough to take them horizontally) and pour over just enough water to barely cover them. Peel and thinly slice the onion and add, along with the bay leaf. Poach over a low heat, until the celery is tender.

Preheat the oven to 180  C. With a draining spoon, remove the celery, onion and bay leaf to a large, shallow baking dish. Use 100ml of the cooking water from the celery along with the butter, flour and milk to make a white sauce, then add half of the Parmesan, and all of the parsley and stir. (Nigel talks about cooking this for a long time before adding the parsley, but I NEVER have time for that sort of faffing. It's a white sauce! Get over it!)

Pour the sauce over the celery and top with breadcrumbs and the rest of the cheese. Bake for forty minutes or so, until the topping is crisp. Rest for a few minutes before serving. You'd have time at this stage to quickly sear a couple of salmon steaks on each side - yum.

Macaroni & Cheese

Saturday night we ate out in the delightfully kitsch Trafford Centre, opting for pan-Asian cuisine at Tampopo. The food was very good for a reasonable price, and they had those lovely large spiced Indonesian prawn crackers and a good selection of Asian beers. Then we hit the mini-golf and Laser Quest; I narrowly won the former, and as a team we utterly destroyed the opponents in the latter. Although one team did consist of a slightly overweight dad and two small children, and were essentially cannon-fodder. Hellstorm, Punky Fish and Captain Atom ruled the day ;)

Sunday we visited the scenic caves of Stockport, then had a relaxing drive home, taking the scenic route over the Peak District via Chesterfield, later driving through the low-traffic neon streets, which to me is like driving in some sort of utopian future. Having eaten a big carvery lunch, we refueled on the go with oranges and cereal bars, getting back in to Cambridge for a bowl of filled pasta before bedtime. Driving's still pretty exhausting for me, and Monday I awoke very tired, so in the evening I craved easy comfort food and an early night. As we had almost nothing in the house it was difficult to figure out something to cook in my tired state, but after a few minutes I realised I had a perfect set of ingredients for the ultimate comfort food.

Ingredients:

• 300 g of dried pasta, preferably small and tubular
• 1 small white onion
• a couple of bay leaves
• 350 ml milk
• a wedge of butter
• 1 tbsp plain or cornflour
• 175 g soft white goat's or sheep's milk cheese
• a few slices of old bread or the end of a baguette
• parmesan

Preheat the oven to 200 C. Boil the pasta in plenty of water for its packet cooking time. Peel and halve the onion, and put it and the bay leaf and milk in a pyrex bowl or pan. Microwave or heat for 10 minutes, watching toward the end so that it does not boil over. When it comes close to the boil, remove from the heat. Microwave the butter in another pyrex jug or bowl until melted, then stir in the cornflour. Discard the onion from the milk, and a few tbsp at a time, stir the hot milk into the roux, until you have a white sauce. Microwave for a further minute, to bring back up to heat; it doesn't need to thicken in the jug.

Drain the pasta, break the cheese into small pieces, and combine them gently in a shallow casserole dish. ( I like to only just cover the bottom of a shallow dish, rather than stack up lots of pasta in a deep one; that way everyone gets more crispy topping!) Season with black pepper, then pour over the white sauce. Using an electric blender, whiz the bread until you have rough breadcrumbs; sprinkle these over the top, and then add a little finely grated parmesan. Bake in the oven for 20 minutes, until crisp and golden. Serve with a lemony spinach salad or sliced ripe tomatoes with a splash of balsamic vinegar.

Stuffed Pancakes

It's pancake day, so here comes a pancake recipe! My mum used to make these every few months for us as kids, and we were always really excited whenever she got the pancake pan out. She used to make two different fillings, one with tuna, and one with vegetables and a white sauce, top them with cheese and bake for 20 minutes. After the savouries (1 of each, seconds first for the eldest :) we'd always be looking forward to the sweet dessert pancakes with sugar and lemon. Good times!

This is a little adaptation I tried out tonight, combining the two ideas: tuna with vegetables, and bulked a little with some cannelini beans. If you're vegetarian, you could just omit the tuna. I use a similar technique as when I make chicken enchiladas: cooking the filling in its own juices briefly, then filling the pancakes and topping with a small amount of white sauce to keep them from crisping too much, then of course cheddar cheese. But unlike tortillas, pancakes can't take lots of strong flavours, so I keep this dish interesting with a gentle use of herbs and letting the filling be a little inhomogeneous.

This serves three, a bit of an awkward number, but the SO is heading off later this week and I wanted an extra portion to reheat later! You could always serve four with this amount, and just have some good bread and salad on the side. You'll need a quality, fairly deep oven pan for this, preferably rectangular, and of course a decent pancake pan.

Ingredients:
For the pancakes:

• 200g plain flour
• 4 eggs
• plenty of milk
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tbsp vegetable oil

For the filling:

• 1 fat leek
• 3 stems of celery
• 2 carrots
• 2 tomatoes
• pinch of thyme
• 1-2 tins tuna
• 1 tin cannelini (or butter) beans

For the white sauce:

• Knob of butter
• 2 tbsp plain flour
• 200ml milk
• grating of nutmeg
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 handful finely chopped parsley

Put the flour in a big bowl and break your eggs in. Whisk them into the flour using a balloon whisk until you have a thick paste with few or no lumps; try not to overmix or the gluten will start going tough. Add milk, a little at a time, and whisk in until your batter has the consistency of thin cream. You can check this by lifting up some of the batter and pouring it with a spoon. It should pour easily, and will be thinner than you expect if you haven't made pancakes before. Whisk in the salt and vegetable oil - the latter will float on the surface but don't worry about it.

Heat the pancake pan to a moderate heat and add enough batter, rotating the pan so it covers it all to make a thin pancake, as large as the width of your oven pan. It's great if you can have someone make all the pancakes while you get on with the filling!

Preheat the oven to 200 C. Slice the leek lengthwise, wash out the dirt from the outer leaves, top and tail and finely chop. Sautee in a little butter over a moderate heat until softened. Meanwhile, dice the celery and carrots, then add and stir in. Dice the tomatoes, then stir them in with the pinch of thyme; cover and allow to cook through for five minutes. The carrots should be just done. Drain your tins; wash the beans (I hate that gloopy weird stuff they float in!); and add the contents to the pan. Break up the tuna into large-ish chunks. Don't be tempted to stir it all in, just combine gently. Cover and allow to heat through for a few minutes.

Meanwhile, make the white sauce. Personally I always do this in the microwave: 20 seconds for the butter, stir in the flour, then add the milk a very little at a time, stirring thoroughly between each addition. Add the nutmeg, bay leaf, and a little seasoning, then microwave for 2 minutes. Stir thoroughly again, especially paying attention the the bottom and sides of the jug, then microwave again for a further minute. Add the parsley, stir and leave to the side. This is not an especially thick white sauce: you can make a thicker one by upping the proportion of flour and cooking for longer.

When all your components are ready, lay a pancake in your oven dish and 1/nth of your filling, where you have n pancakes. Roll it up, and repeat until all your pancakes are filled and nestled in the dish. Pour over the white sauce and top with grated cheddar cheese. Bake for 20 minutes, until golden brown on top. Delicious, unchallenging comfort food.