A Night with the Greeks

What better way to begin 2013 that with good friends, good food, good memories, and good laughs?  Drew, Emily, and I rung in the new year together, and then on New Year's day we came up with the idea of creating Greek food dinner.  Emily and I travelled to Athens on a school trip last summer, and since then she's started somewhat of a tradition of preparing our favorite foods from that adventure.  For this dinner, we decided to make Greek salad (naturally!), moussaka, and pomegranate seeds with vanilla and honey Greek yogurt.

We started with a trip to HEB, gathering delicious and fresh ingredients.  I can't wait for all of the farmer's markets this spring! I would describe moussaka as a cross between Shepherd's pie and lasagna.  It's filled with eggplant, tomato sauce, onions, garlic, and ground beef with a fluffy parmesan cheese sauce topping that bakes up into a delicious golden brown crust. So amazing!!


For our Greek salad, we used cucumbers, tomatoes, a red onion, salt, pepper, olive oil, and of course some delicious feta cheese.  Just a quick side note: any restaurant that serves Greek salad with lettuce is lying!! There is no lettuce in a true Greek salad, I repeat, there is no lettuce in Greek salad!

We started by preparing the moussaka, which involved peeling and slicing our eggplants into thin layers that we covered in olive oil, salt, and pepper. Then, we broiled these in the oven for 5 minutes on each side.  While Emily and I did that, Drew sautéed together chopped onions and garlic in olive oil.  After that, he added in the ground beef.  Traditionally, ground lamb would be used here.  Then, a can of tomato sauce was added.  Once the eggplant was broiled and the meat filling was done, we layered the two together in our pan and made the cheese sauce.

For the cheese sauce, we melted butter and then whisked in flour and half and half.  Once this was bubbly and thick, we added a beaten egg and our parmesan cheese.  Then, we just poured it over the rest of our layers and put the whole thing into the oven to bake! Then it was time to quickly prepare the Greek salad while we waited the 45 minutes that our moussaka would have to bake.  

Once we finished that, we still had a bit of time so we decided to take Lance for a quick walk around the neighborhood.  Part of our reasoning was that we would work up our appetites even more, but we also just wanted to be able to walk into a house full of the delicious smell of tasty moussaka!!  Unfortunately, we came back to discover that we forgot to turn the oven on! Oh well!! Forty-five more minutes it was and we definitely won't make that mistake next time.  After it was done cooking, for real this time, it looked absolutely scrumptious and smelled even better!

Here's a picture of our table:

And of course, who could forget desert? Pomegranates are absolutely one of my favorite fruits ever! The Greek myth goes Persephone was a beautiful and much-loved young woman, daughter of Zeus and Demeter, the goddess of harvest.  Hades, god of the underworld, wanted her for himself so one day when she was out picking flowers he made the ground open up and grabbed her, with only Zeus and the all-seeing sun Helios seeing what had happened. Demeter was distraught and brokenhearted over the loss of her daughter, until Helios revealed her daughter's fate.

After that, she became enraged and drew into loneliness, leaving the earth to become infertile.  Knowing that this couldn't continue, Zeus sent Hermes to the underworld to make Hades release Persephone.  While she was there, Persephone had not eaten or drank because she knew that anyone who ate in the Underworld would be bound there, even a goddess.  But before she went, Hades gave Persephone a pomegranate.  She ate 6 seeds from it, meaning that she would have to stay.  However, Hermes made a compromise with Hades that Persephone would spend six months with him, since she had eaten 6 seeds, and six months with her mother Demeter on earth.  This explains the cycle of the seasons, as fall and winter are the six months in which Persephone was away and Demeter grieved the leaving of her daughter.  Spring and summer are the times in which Persephone returned, giving Demeter great joy.

This was one of the best meals that I've gotten to prepare in a long time, mostly because it was prepared with friends, lots of love, and even more laughter.  We even decided to make this a new tradition, with a challenge to ourselves to go "Around the World in Eighty Plates". Our next stop will be Israel! I hope that everyone else is having a lovely new year, and that it was filled with just as much love and laughter as ours was!

Also, the recipe we used was Kittencal's Greek Moussaka Recipe on Food.com!