(Gosh it’s been so long! If you were waiting, our apologies to you. Bran – not as bad as if you were reading my blog or Jac’s though )

Jac: Bran loves moussaka (eyes glaze over at the mere mention, you get the picture?) and I’d volunteered to cook for Valentine’s this year during an unguarded starry-eyed moment at last year ’s Valentine’s dinner, so this is the result.

Bran: Moussaka! Ooooh, yummy cheesy goodness – it brings me back to my childhood in the UK, where school dinners involved moussaka and other delicious cheese dishes. Admittedly, you don’t usually associate school canteen fare with yummilicity, but there must’ve been something to it, to have had an effect on me down the years… But anyway, it’s the greek wonder that is moussaka!

This time I used a recipe, er, more like a mish-mash of a few moussaka recipes I found off the net. But in general I stuck to this one http://greekfood.about.com/od/maindishes/ss/moussaka.htm.

Making moussaka is a rather time consuming affair and if done in one sitting can take up to 2.5 hours and as such I decided to make the meat filling the day before. It’s a doubly good idea as well because letting the meat sauce sit overnight (in the fridge of course) intensifies its taste. And I must say that the sauce made up of minced beef, onions, tomatoes, all-spice, cinnamon, nutmeg and wine was heavenly. Bran had to admonish me many a time as I kept dipping in to ‘taste’ the sauce ;p. I could have it on its own or on top of pasta or with rice or bread or..sigh, the possibilities are endless! (Bran – The stars know if I hadn’t stopped her from pecking at the meat…. )

The meat sauce dried up beautifully after an hour of simmering gently

The next day I started by making the cheese Bechamel sauce that was to be the sinfully decadent topping to the moussaka. Bechamel is a white sauce made with milk, butter, flour, egg yolks and for this recipe cheese was also added. It was fascinating how the sauce thickened just as prescribed by the recipe!

The eggplants were sprinkled with salt and left for half an hour to draw out its bitter juices then sliced and deep fried until nicely browned.

Once all the main components were ready, the layering processes began, and this is how it went (from top to bottom):

Cheese Bechamel
Meat Filling
Eggplant
Meat Filling
Eggplant

Then with a sprinkling of grated Parmesan and a dash of nutmeg and cinnamon on top, it was popped into the oven for 45 minutes to an hour.

The result was unfortunately a bit salty and we figure it’s because each component was seasoned with salt (and the egg plant was actually coated with liberal amounts of salt in the ‘de-bitter-ing’ process) and somehow the combination turned out to be over-seasoned. So next time I’ll under-season and maybe it’ll turn out perfect! We had the moussaka with a walnut loaf and an olive oil and balsamic vinegar dip.

Bran – It might have been a bit salty, but it didn’t change my appreciation of the moussaka by much – after all, it was a labour of love!

Obviously presents are not necessary but as a token we made a pact that the presents must be RM50 and below, and so the book was for me and the wooden pepper mill and coffee maker were for him. As of now the book’s half read, there’s peppercorns in the mill and the coffee maker has churned out steeped coffee for him and her