Pasta is always a favorite at my house. So tonight I decided to pull out a trusted recipe for Pastitsio. For those you who don’t know about this dish. It is a Greek dish which has layers of pasta in a modified morney sauce and a ground meat and tomato mixture. The recipe is quite simple if a bit time consuming.
The most difficult part of it is the sauce. For my pastitsio recipe, the sauce takes a mornay sauce (aka cheese sauce) and adds eggs. As with making a custard, I always make sure to take the eggs out a long time before I use them so they are room temperate. This keeps them from curdling when added to the hot milk.
Once the two parts: macaroni and cheese/egg sauce; and meat mixture are cooked, they get layered. Macaroni, meat, macaroni. Some recipes call for nutmeg on the top or in the egg/cheese sauce but my family really doesn’t like nutmeg. So I don’t use it in my recipe. Sometimes I put paprika on time like I do my macaroni and cheese but this is really for color not flavor. Another thing which changes off and on in my recipe is whether I use ground lamb, or lean ground beef. My husband likes ground beef and I prefer lamb. So I go back and forth depending on what I have available.
After baking, you should like the casserole cool before cutting. This will ensure the you can get nice squares out relatively easily. If you don’t care about looks you can dive right in to serving with a spoon like my husband did with this batch!