there are some recipes which i’ve been cooking “forever” and therefore always know where to start when i’m making them. other dishes, despite me making them regularly, just don’t seem to have that same instinctive nature to them. for me, moussaka fits into the latter category. i always link it to lamb mince, aubergine and a white sauce, but that’s it.

the good thing about this is that it means i drag out my cook books, look at recipes online and as a result, often learn something new. and i learnt quite  a lot from cooking this, using a tessa kiros recipe from the cypriot section of falling cloudberries.

first was that lamb is not the default choice of meat – she uses a mix of pork and beef. i stuck with the lamb but used her method of getting the meat sauce started by frying onion until golden and then adding garlic and chopped parsley which becomes aromatic and then you add the meat. the addition of a herb like parsley at this stage is not something i’m used to (although i do add chopped coriander stems at this stage in various dishes) and i was surprised at how the parsley flavour did not get lost and that the green fleck of the herb remained in the final sauce. the flavour was softer than if i’d added it at the end and that lack of fresh zinginess was exactly right for this dish, and is something i need to remember.

the other learning was not a new technique – it was about pre-cooking the aubergine and potato slices. tessa stipulates the need to shallow-fry both in olive oil. i stuck to my previously tried & tested healthier approach of roasting the oil-brushed slices of aubergine (c10 minutes at 180c) but did fry the potatoes, until cooked through and golden and crispy in places. as a result they were meltingly soft in the final dish which was just perfect.

in fact the whole thing was very close to perfection – the flavours melded wonderfully and the softly textured vegetables made it a wonderfully comforting dish. the one thing i will fiddle about with is the white sauce that tops everything off – a friend of mine swears by a souffléd sauce to crown her moussaka, which i really must try.

we’ve been away for a few days and came back to a kitchen which was home to 3 bulbs of fennel and not much else. my original plan was to make a pasta gratin, which a friend recommended, where the fennel is complemented with black olives, sundried tomatoes, lemon, oregano.

however, i had a craving for meat so decided to try these flavours and ingredients with a slow-roasted neck of lamb recipe that i've made before. this is wonderfully easy one-dish cooking – three bulbs of fennel and a red onion, all sliced thinly, put in a bowl with some chopped garlic, a handful of black olives (i used kalamata), a few chopped sundried tomatoes and chunks of lamb. add some oregano (dried is fine), the juice and zest of a lemon, olive oil and black pepper, mix together and then roast for c3hours at 160c.

we ate this with a salad of red onions (put them in a bowl with some lime juice, which is discarded after 5-10 minutes, to soften their flavour), cannelloni beans and tomatoes, dressed with olive oil and an extra squeeze of lime juice.

if the weather had been a bit cooler i’d have just added the beans to the lamb dish an hour before it finished cooking – it’s wonderfully forgiving and will adapt to whatever you have in.

this is a very unglamorous picture, which is not surprising as the dish itself was thoroughly rustic. however, it more than made up for this in it’s wonderful flavours.

slow-cooked lamb  - leg or shoulder with the bone in – is a favourite of mine. i love lamb which can be “carved” with a fork and spoon. my lack of interest in potatoes and traditional roast dinners means that we usually have this with a pilaf of some sort, or beans which have been cooked under the lamb so that they absorb its flavours.

this time i cooked the lamb on a bed of chickpeas (1 tin, drained and rinsed), a couple of sliced red peppers, some garlic, stock and white wine. when the lamb was ready – c3hrs at 170c – i put it aside, drained the liquid from the chickpea and pepper mix, skimmed off the fat and then used this in place of stock to  reconstitute some couscous. when it was ready, i added the chickpea and pepper mix to the couscous along with the juice and zest of a lemon, a handful of finely chopped spring onions, chopped mint and parsley plus seasoning.

the resulting couscous was packed with the flavours of the lamb which were lightened up and made more spring-like by the lemon and herbs. we ate this with a salad on the side and had leftovers as a packed lunch the following day.

supper last night was very easy. it needed to be as david was doing the final coats of paint in the kitchen, a job i started last september when we moved into the house, but didn’t get round to finishing (for a good but very boring reason!).

it was also a meal of necessity as the fridge was almost empty and the choice of ingredients limited. the starting point was a couple of pieces of lamb neck fillet which i’d bought during one of summer’s many chilly patches, with a warming stew in mind.

instead, inspired by this delia recipe, i decided to slowly roast the lamb with onions, lemon and herbs. after 3 hours in the oven the result was beautifully tender meat, meltingly soft onions and a meal which should have resulted in leftovers but which was completely demolished. i shall be making it again!

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