Meatless Moussaka – Inauthentic but Delicious

Mushroom Moussaka :

The Eggplant:

• Preheat your oven to 400°F.
• Peel and slice an eggplant into thin rounds.  Two eggplants might be better, but I only had one.
• Salt both sides of the eggplant slices.
• Lay them out between two layers of paper towels for a half hour or so to draw out some water.
• Rub olive oil over both sides of the eggplant, arrange them on a cookie sheet, and bake them for 15-20 minutes.  The idea is to brown them just a little and to draw out more moisture.  (You don’t want moussaka soup.)
• When you’re done, turn the oven down to 350°F.

Meanwhile, the Moussaka Innards:

• Sauté a chopped, yellow onion until it starts to turn translucent.
• Add in a few coarsely chopped carrots.
• And about four pulverized garlic cloves too.
• Sauté a little more.
• Throw in a whole normal-sized package of baby portobello mushrooms, coarsely chopped.
• Stir in a hefty amount of oregano.  In this case, fresh oregano will be especially worthwhile.
• Add in a large can of puréed tomato’s worth of puréed tomatoes.
• Simmer.
• Stir in a dose of ground cinnamon, a big spoonful or so.
• A spoonful of paprika will also be good.
• I put in a giant pinch of ground ancho chili.
• The secret ingredient is a spoonful of Ghirardelli hot cocoa mix.  Well, really, it was just the closest thing I had to pure cocoa powder.
• Season with salt and pepper.
• Continue sautéing.
• Shortly before it becomes fairly thick, add in a lot of finely chopped fresh parsley.  Dried parsley just won’t work here.  I put in about half the bunch as bundled by the store.
• Simmer for a couple more minutes.  It should be thick.

The Cheese Sauce:

• Make a simple roux + milk + cheese sauce:
• Melt some butter.  I’ve got some Smart Balance, supposedly healthier, buttery-ish spread that I use for toast.  If you use it for cooking, it tastes like you used the yellow butterifying goo on movie theater popcorn.  So, this time I added a dab of it to the regular butter just to, what do they say on Food Network?  Kick it up a… something or another…
• Stir in a whopping handful of flour.
• Keep stirring − until it’s deeply golden and smooth.
• Add just a little milk.
• Incorporate.
• Repeat incorporation of milk in small increments until what you’ve got is sort of like a thick pumpkin soup.
• Add in more milk until it’s thinner.  It all depends on how much cheese you use and how much sauce you want.  (It needs to cover your baking dish.)  I probably used about a cup and a half in total.
• Stir in about a half a cup of cheese.  I used a blend of hard mozzarella and cheap Parmesan that is relatively soft and flavorless when compared with the good stuff.  It’s my standard.
• Stir and melt.
• In a little bowl, whisk 2 egg yolks.
• Whisk a dose of hot sauce into either your yolks or your cheese-milk.
• Whisk the yolks into the milk.
• Season with salt and pepper.
• Your result should be thick enough to sit on top of the moussaka you’re about to put together.

The Assembly & Production:

• In a baking dish, arrange alternating layers of:
• Eggplant slices.
• Topped by a very light sprinkling of cheese.
• Topped by a medium-thick layer of the tomato veggie sauce.
• Repeat until everything is used or pan is almost full.
• Then,
• Pour your cheese sauce over top.
• Top your cheese sauce with light sprinkling of cheese.
• Bake at 350°F until the cheese on top has satisfactorily browned.

The Review: Winner! Sure, you can’t use vegetables to make it taste like it has lamb in it.  The flavor of what I had was pretty nice though.  I enjoyed the texture of the large chunks of carrot in what is otherwise a pretty soft mound of food.  Well, really, I guess I should say it was a good solution to a moussaka that was, without meat and without enough eggplant, much softer than it normally would have been.