Lovely aubergine

In my veg box this week I received a massive, gorgeous aubergine; I love aubergine, but my husband isn’t so keen, and as it’s so big I did wonder how I could manage to eat all of it, even with all the lovely recipes there are… then he suddenly suggested I make moussaka! I had forgotten that he likes it so I began to look for recipes, thinking that the fruit is big enough to also make some patlican soslu (aubergine with tomato sauce)and some baba ganoush (aubergine dip)!

It’s quite a while since I made a moussaka – or musakka, but I remember it being layers of tomatoey meat sauce, white sauce and fried/griddled/roasted aubergine. I had a quick gallop through various recipes I have, and I had remembered pretty well except quite a few call for spices such as nutmeg and cinnamon, and plenty of herbs. So I set to this afternoon with making the meat sauce, just very plain, onions, garlic, (some non-traditional red peppers as I had some left over) meat, tomatoes, tomato paste, a little chilli (just a little) and some pomegranate syrup. It’s now slowly cooking in the slow oven, and tomorrow I will prepare the aubergines, make the white (bechamel) sauce, add fresh herbs to the meat sauce and assemble it… into the oven it will go, and maybe we will open a bottle of wine to go with it!

(I just want to share with you that the spell check here wanted to change bechamel to chameleon – I definitely won’t be making or eating and chameleon sauce!)