Tuesday: Meal 2 – Greek Moussaka

Having survived night one relatively unscathed I went into day two with much of the same approach (I’m a slow learner). It was late Tuesday afternoon when I decided it would be fun to make this week a cultural week. Upon hearing this my girlfriend decided we were having a Greek night so I went to work trying to find a nice authentic Greek dish.

Since last nights dish was relatively simple (other than the pasta scavenger hunt) I thought maybe tonight we’d would do something a little more complicated. After all, this is supposed to be a cooking ‘challenge.’

I stumbled across this great 10 min video on Jamie Oliver’s video blog for Greek Moussaka. That sounded fun and the chef in the video made it look so easy and simple to prepare (plus it stared some sexy Latin chef guy so I knew it would make for an easier sell to Brittney). I quickly checked the ingredients list, I wasn’t going to be stumped by a mystery item again, but other than there being a lot of ingredients, everything seemed pretty straight forward.

I got out of work a bit late so by the time I hit the grocery store and tracked down all of what was on my list it was already pushing 7:30. I got home to an already hungry girlfriend who wasn’t super excited about my ‘more challenging’ dinner choice. Unfortunately it was too late to turn back so we went to work prepping the Moussaka.

As we went through each step we quickly discovered that it was taking us much longer to accomplish than the video we had watched. The dam sexy Latin chef had his pre-prepped layers of food popping in and out of the oven at the blink of an eye while we were stuck trudging along at a snails pace as we prepped and baked each section as we approached it in the directions.

This is where things began to turn for the worse. What started out as a fun couples date night had rapidly morphed into a perfect storm of hanger, frustration and emotion. After some minor constructive criticism from myself and some well deserved backlash from Brittney, I was suddenly preparing the remainder of the dish on my own (relationship lesson 101: never try to tell a hangry woman that she’s doing something wrong. Just feed them crackers and apologize).

Finally at just before 10pm I took the Moussaka out of the oven having finished baking the final layer. The directions then read “now let cool for 1 hour.” It was like the sexy Latin chef was mocking me.

Needless to say we lasted a whole 3 minutes of cooling before we devoured a large chunk of the meal. It tasted like bitterness (not really it tasted pretty good but at 10pm at night bitterness is all you taste).

Lessons Learned:

• A 10 minute Youtube video recipe does not equal a 10 minute meal.
• Start as Early as possible and read the whole recipe before starting. This will let multitask each stage rather than dragging out each step before taking on the next.
• Prep your ingredients in advance! You’ll spend less time chopping and more time cooking so you’ll eat a Lot sooner.

Here is the link to the video and recipe if you’d like to give it a go.