Quick Pastitsio, Cooking Light October 2011
Served with a green salad
When I was a kid, we went every year to the Greek Food Festival. I always got pastitsio. I probably first tried it because it was the only thing without olives or lamb, or maybe because it was the thing that most closely resembled macaroni and cheese. But I really loved it and always looked forward to it every year.
I do have a recipe for it, which was submitted by someone with a Greek-sounding last name to the Fresno Bee newspaper. So it very well could be the same one that was served at the food festival. I've made it a couple times, but it isn't as good as the real thing in my hands. Anyway, I was intrigued when I saw a recipe in Cooking Light for pastitsio. And the entire thing is made in the time that it takes just to bake the recipe I previously owned. Even more intriguing, it includes cream cheese.
Yes, Cooking Light has decided that instead of going through the trouble of making a bechamel sauce, why not just melt some cream cheese in milk (with a touch of flour)? It looks the same, after all! Although many of the other ingredients are the same (pasta, ground beef, onion, garlic, tomatoes), the cream cheese really does stand out, and instead of being a layered dish it is just all mixed together and fairly runny. I guess this is like baked ziti as opposed to lasagne. G has never had pastitsio (as far as he knows), so he thought it was good. This was a decent baked pasta recipe, although I would never let a Greek person see this recipe (>_<) It's the only recipe I've seen that has basically a uniform distribution of reviews from 1 to 5 stars. G says "mm, sure" to keep the recipe because it's fast. I guess he didn't like it as much now that he is seeing the dishes piled up. There are a lot of leftovers, too.
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