Farmers Market Venison Pastitsio, page 30-31

Now that's a full pan of pastitsio!

Fred here. This was another recipe that would expand my vocabulary, if nothing else.  It contains eggplant, zucchini, summer squash, venison, penne pasta, oyster mushrooms, parmesan cheese and a bechamel sauce, all layered like a lasagna.

Ann and I worked on it together on Sunday afternoon, although she was definitely in charge. She would probably have referred to me as a sous-chef, but I was really more of an escuelerie. I did grate some cheese, and get tomatoes out of the downstairs freezer when needed.  

We usually try to do these recipes by the book, but after we had browned our venison, and added the two tomatoes, the skillet just looked like browned venison. The tomatoes disappeared. But the picture in the book looked like a red sauce, like you might see in lasagna. We added another tomato. It disappeared, too. We added a can of tomato paste. The meat started to look a little red, so we stopped there, not wanting to deviate from the recipe too much.

The tomatoes from the freezer where late season tomatoes that we ripened off of the vine, which may be why they faded away so quickly.

When we shifted from the mixing bowl to the 9 x 13 glass cake pan for baking, we were glad we hadn’t added any more tomatoes, or any more of anything else. That pan was full. We even tried to push it down to compress it between layers, and it was still quite heaped up in the middle. When we added the sauce on top as the last step, I thought it was going to run over. We debated trying to take out about a third of it and put it in a different pan, but since it was in layers it seemed like that would end up being a real mess, so we stuck with having the pan piled high.

Fortunately the sauce added in the last step was fairly thick, and the whole dish was rather dry. I expected it to boil over and bubble out a lot while baking, but it didn’t lose a drop.

The result: A very hearty dish that may be the very epitome of pastitsio, but I would simply call a casserole. I was hungry when I set down, and I loved it, and kept filling my plate.

We should have invited friends, though. The boys didn’t really go for it, and we have a lot left over. If Henry and Oliver didn’t eat it on round one, we can be pretty sure they won’t like the leftovers much better. On the other hand, it will make a lot of good lunches. This was our next-to-last venison recipe from the book, but we still have a lot of ground venison left, and I look forward to having this again. Sorry kids.