Big adventures in dinner tonight — finally ran through all the easy stuff in the kitchen and had to buckle down and make the pastitsio that I had acquired all the ingredients for earlier in the week.
pastitsio | παστιτσιο | Greek layered pasta with beef and bechamel
(I had to put a stock picture in there because neither of us took any pictures of the final product.)
I used this recipe because it specifically called for Greek brands of tomato paste and crushed tomatoes, and they just happened to be the same brands that I had already been buying in the local grocery store. Felt like a sign that the recipe had solid roots in actual Greek ingredients.
(I didn’t use penne, I used the actual pastitsio pasta shape, which is readily available from a number of brands here. They look like giant pool noodle bucatini.)
It had some structural issues — I expected the noodles to be “pan length” after being cooked, but they were way longer, and I got concerned that it wouldn’t look quite like the cross-cut of every picture you see if I couldn’t line them up manually — and so I didn’t do quite what the recipe said in terms of “tossing the noodles with cheese” because I wanted more control of how I got the noodles in the pan. I think ultimately however that if you get all the noodles into their layer, that no matter what way you cut, you’ll have all those noodles lined up.
Next time.
And there will be a next time because it’s pretty tasty stuff. Glad there’s a whole pan of leftovers for this week.