A comfort cook
We had a bit of a week of it last week. We are a DINKWAD household, plural on the D. Those little furry friends have bought us a great deal of sunshine in times of gloomy, grey skies. Givers of serotonin, laughs and love when we have needed it most. They are a much loved part of our little family unit.
Mid-January, our littlest went in for some surgery, to cut a long and stressful story short, he caught aspiration pneumonia as a result and we had a long 4 day wait to see if he would make it through. As quick as we were receiving news to prepare for the worst, we got the best news – he was coming home!
Fast forward to a weekend later and we are all home, sleepy, tired and in need of a bit of continued TLC. Even though it's summer, the mood called for a comfort cook. A few Christmas' ago, the B&C bought me Rick Stein's cookbook – At Home – Recipes, Memories and Stories from a Food Lover's Kitchen. The book came recommended by my dear friend Ange, a constant go to for book and recipes reccos and I was delighted to receive it.
I have cooked many things from this book, it's great, some impossibly easy, some more complex. The book has a chapter called 'recipes that got me through lockdown' a great chapter of big hug meals. It's funny reading the foreward for this chapter, we were all doing the same things to pass time, going for walks, gardening, things to keep the mind busy. Rick chose Thursday Night dinners as his focus for getting the very minimal people you loved together for a good meal. His favourite is a pastitsio, he got the recipe for from a little restaurant in Corfu Town, looked delish, so I had made my choice.
This recipe is not necessarily hard, but it does contain on of my cooking nemeses – white sauce. I hate making white sauce. My mum is epic at it. In fact at Christmas time I said I would do it for her and she politely shooed me away. She whipped it up with the ease of a woman who has made it more times than I could ever imagine and with a calm of a woman that knows it's tedious but worth it in the end. I always find cheats, there are some great ones, but none of them really give you the same result.
There's really 3 parts to this recipe – the meat sauce, the white sauce and the pasta mix. Two of them I whipped through. The meat sauce is delightfully easy, accessible ingredients, heaps of lovely herbs and spices, red wine, tomatoes, all the good stuff. The most strenuous bit about it is chopping vege, the rest is a just sort of chuck it all in and leave to simmer. The pasta mix, cook it, but then mix it with some of the white sauce and what I think is the best bit about this recipe, mixing in kefalotyri cheese which you grate.
I approached the white sauce channelling my best Jen McArthur, huffed and puffed, got a bit exasperated, but managed to do a good job. Helped by listening to Dolly Alderton's new book Good Material, super entertaining and a good distraction from the constant whisking.
It's a Greek lasagne so all you really need to do is layer it, simple enough, but layers also sometimes get the better of me. By the end of a multi pan cook, I can get pretty slapdash, but it's respectable enough. It's yum, it's the hug in a bowl we needed and great with a glass of red on the lounge with my beloved sleeping woofers and the cricket playing in the background, it is summer after all.
This recipe is available online on The Happy Foodie site, but I do so recommend the whole book.
Rick Stein Pastitsio | Baked Beef Macaroni Pasta Dish (thehappyfoodie.co.uk)
