When I say cheap I mean really, really cheap. It cost me £3.80 and made enough for three hungry people with leftovers. In fact, it would easily feed four people with normal appetites.
Pastitsio is another thing I hadn't heard of until I read the book ‘Home Cooking'. The dish is made of a layer of macaroni, or other tubular pasta, a layer of moussaka style meat sauce and topped with béchamel . It looked something like this.
I've had trouble with the recipes in this particular book before (see the post about lemon and horseradish pasta), so I did my usual trick of just getting an idea of flavours and then making it up myself. The sauce was made of beef mince, tomato, garlic based with onions, red wine, cinnamon and ground cloves. I added lamb stock cubes to it because I think lamb has a more pleasant flavour than beef.
I cooked the pasta in the standard way then tossed it with finely chopped parsley, olive oil and nutmeg. And a bit more cinnamon. The béchamel had lots of nutmeg too. To be honest, I wasn't all that impressed by the yoghurt-egg combo. In future I'll just leave it out and top this with béchamel and cheese. The meat and pasta combination was delicious. I love Greek spices. I'd like to class this as a student recipe but there might be a problem with that. From what I've seen, most students tend not to buy things that seem expensive but last a long time. Things like cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves probably aren't found in an average student kitchen and I suppose margarine is favoured over butter for it's cheapness. Maybe only a few students who really like cooking will appreciate this kind of recipe.
Here is the pastitsio recipe
When I say cheap I mean really, really cheap. It cost me £3.80 and made enough for three hungry people with leftovers. In fact, it would easily feed four people with normal appetites.
Pastitsio is another thing I hadn't heard of until I read the book ‘Home Cooking'. The dish is made of a layer of macaroni, or other tubular pasta, a layer of moussaka style meat sauce and topped with béchamel . It looked something like this.
I've had trouble with the recipes in this particular book before (see the post about lemon and horseradish pasta), so I did my usual trick of just getting an idea of flavours and then making it up myself. The sauce was made of beef mince, tomato, garlic based with onions, red wine, cinnamon and ground cloves. I added lamb stock cubes to it because I think lamb has a more pleasant flavour than beef.
I cooked the pasta in the standard way then tossed it with finely chopped parsley, olive oil and nutmeg. And a bit more cinnamon. The béchamel had lots of nutmeg too. To be honest, I wasn't all that impressed by the yoghurt-egg combo. In future I'll just leave it out and top this with béchamel and cheese. The meat and pasta combination was delicious. I love Greek spices. I'd like to class this as a student recipe but there might be a problem with that. From what I've seen, most students tend not to buy things that seem expensive but last a long time. Things like cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves probably aren't found in an average student kitchen and I suppose margarine is favoured over butter for it's cheapness. Maybe only a few students who really like cooking will appreciate this kind of recipe.
Here is the pastitsio recipe
