Greek Night: not exactly a smashing meal

 I broke a plate the other day. 

Stupid really, it just slipped out of my hand while I was putting away the dishes I'd just washed up. I always feel annoyed with myself when that happens, and feel like smashing another one in frustration - or to even out the number I have left, at the very least. I usually manage to resist the temptation, but with plates it then always makes me think of Greek restaurants - and on this occasion, it reminded me of my tinned "Greek Night", from quite a few years ago now.

I say "Greek Night" - in reality, I just had two vaguely Greek-themed tins: one of stuffed dolmades (vine leaves), and another of moussaka. I'd love to say that I had brought them back from a sun-drenched Greek holiday, but I think I found the former in Lidl, and the latter in the international section of my local Tesco. Anyway, it was probably after a similar plate-breaking incident that I decided it was time to open them and see what they were like.

My inclination was that the dolmades were probably going to be awful - I had visions of the vine leaves going really mushy and horrible in the tin, and failing in their job to hold the rice filling together - but I reckoned that the moussaka would probably fare somewhat better.

Opening up the dolmades as my starter, they looked and smelled...pretty much how you might expect stuffed vine leaves to be. There was a little bit of excess liquid in the tin, but they seemed to have held together very well, even when picked up. The canning process had not damaged the structural integrity of the leaves whatsoever, and they were actually quite delicious. A palpable hit.

How would the moussaka fare in comparison? The picture on the tin looked pretty good: a nice, robust, solid-looking bake, with well-defined layers of meat and aubergine, and a nice bechamel top. I was slightly surprised to see from the ingredients list that it was made with minced beef rather than what I thought was the more traditional lamb, but Wikipedia seemed to suggest that isn't always the case, so I questioned it no further. The label said it was ready to eat, but best served hot, and of the options for either decanting the contents and microwaving them, or immersing the tin in hot water for 10 minutes, I went for the latter, providing as it does that slight extra thrill of worrying that it might explode on you.

Fortunately that didn't occur, and after its ten minutes I removed it from its bath and carefully opened the lid to reveal...slices of aubergine. Which presumably meant, that this was the bottom of the moussaka, and hence it needed turning out to reveal its various layers, with the bechamel on top. 

So I put a plate on top of the tin, very carefully inverted it (now was not the time for any more plate-smashing), gave the tin a little jiggle, and then removed it to reveal...

Oh. Dear. God. There, I suppose, was the bechamel layer, atop a sort of landslide-slump of everything else. It seemed a world away from the proud, robust structure of the moussaka in the picture on the tin. The only really discernible layers were those of oil and water in the liquid that surrounded the whole thing. It looked, to put it mildly, pretty grim.

Taste-wise, it did not fare much better. The aubergine was slippery and slimy with quite a lot of the bitter seeds still there; the meat lacked much flavour of beef, lamb or anything really, and the bechamel was just a bit of an oily slop on top of it all. In short, more than a little disappointing. I was quite tempted to ditch it and stick with the dolmades instead.

What I didn't eat of the moussaka did, admittedly, firm up a little in the fridge overnight, and I should have just eaten the leftovers cold. Reheated, they returned to their disppointing-looking slump. Smashing a plate would frankly have been quite tempting, but to save on washing up I'd had the remains straight from the tupperware they had been stored in. The clunk of a plastic pot against the kitchen floor would have been even less evocative of a Greek holiday than this abomination of a classic dish. But - great dolmades, so in that respect, the meal was the complete opposite of what I expected - excellent starter, terrible main course. When it comes to knowing which foods will survive the canning process and which won't, I'm clearly still clueless. It's all Greek to me, you might say.