Month 9 day 17: Moussakasagna

Today I ate the stratas and sausage from yesterday, and made:
Sock-It-to-Me Moussaka Lasagna, Every Day with Rachael Ray October 2011
(with Herbs de Provence from Food Network)

 We ate the pear strata and sausage first, because the other one needed a bit longer in the oven. The pear strata servings are not that large, because the bread is just not that thick and so it's not very tall. It didn't make a large impression on me because of that. The cheese didn't seem overpowering, and the pear was fine, but there just weren't that strong of flavors in this dish. I did forget to put out the maple syrup though, so maybe that would have made it better? It won 2/6 votes. The sausage was pretty good, I thought. It has lots of different spices, like sage, thyme, allspice, coriander... kind of an odd combination. I would definitely make them again.

The strata came out looking colorful and attractive, but the one picture I took of it was blurry, so this is just a picture of cold leftovers :-/ This one had a lot of volume from the kale and fluffy 1" cubes of sourdough. Despite being half-sized, it needed more than the specified amount of time to bake fully. After 45 minutes it was still pretty liquidy inside. Luckily one of the guests had eaten strata before and knew what consistency it was supposed to be. By the time we finished with our first course it was ready, and I thought it was pretty good. I don't remember too much more to say about it, but it got the other 4 votes. I would probably make this strata instead of the other one, although of course it depends on what mood you're in.

For dinner I made this weird hybrid moussaka-lasagna. It uses lavash bread instead of noodles. I'm pretty sure the intention was to use fresh lavash bread, but there wasn't any of that at the grocery store, so I just used crackers. According to wikipedia, dried lavash bread can be sprinkled with water and then used like fresh lavash bread? Anyway, it was going to be baked in the middle of sauce and cheese, so I figured whatever. I only had enough for two layers, but anyway this lasagna was too tall for our dish! As it baked it kept overflowing and smoking up the kitchen. I'm not sure why it requires a full hour to bake when all of the vegetables are pre-roasted and the meat is cooked in advance too, and everything was still hot when it went together. Oh well.

This didn't really taste like a moussaka, I guess because it has normal marinara sauce and doesn't really have anything that is distinct from a normal lasagna (unlike real moussaka, which has potatoes). So it just seemed like a lasagna that was more complicated that normal. I like the idea of putting so many different roasted vegetables in a lasagna, though. The lavash bread did become soft and noodle-like, but unfortunately it had a ton of seeds, including caraway seeds, which I don't like. Thankfully there were only a couple of bites that had that flavor.

G suggests that next time it would be better to just make a lasagna. Or a moussaka.