Vegetarian Youvetsi with Roasted Cauliflower and Red Pepper

Last time Tony and I moved house it was a rather stressful experience for us. I'd just sold my apartment and Tony and I were moving in together for the first time. It was all very rushed and we ended up choosing a house that didn't really suit our needs (like proper heating and somewhere to park the car).

Call us crazy but three years later we are still living in this uncomfortable house. On the surface it's a beautiful, character-filled art deco home, but both Tony and I really struggle with the cold and living in a house with pathetic heating and no insulation is something we just can't do no more. It's also dark, the bathroom is a thousand years old and we have possums living in the ceiling. The only reason we're still here is because of our grand plan to move to Brisbane. We decided to stick it out until we were ready to move to sunny Queensland, and didn't want the hassle of making another move in between.

Learning from our past mistakes, this time we are planning our move well in advance. Moving interstate also means the logistics will be more complicated than just moving to another suburb. We've actually postponed our move until February now so we have plenty of time to pack and clean this place and find a suitable house in Brisbane that we both love. It's seven months away, but yes, I've already started packing!

This time around I am thoroughly going through stuff and culling what I can before it gets packed. I'm not going to just throw everything in boxes without labelling and leaving them piled up in cupboards and under beds for years like I've done in the past. There are so many of these boxes still lying around in this house with who-knows-what in them.

So by "packing" I mean I've been "unpacking" these boxes over the last few weeks to reassess what stays and what goes before repacking again. And boy have I found some stupid things. Have you ever kept the empty packaging for a set of wooden spoons? Or a 3-year-old opened box of cereal? (Even a 3-year-old unopened box of cereal would be weird.) These are the sorts of ridiculous things I'm finding in unpacked boxes from our last, very unorganised move.

However, among the rubbish in these boxes are some great forgotten treasures like old records, Greek Drachma coins, an old upright telephone with a dial on the base, film negatives and hand-written recipes. All this nostalgia got me thinking about what life used to be like before the internet, mobile phones, digital cameras, and iTunes. Oh, those were the simple days. Some things don't change though, like the food we love and remember eating at home when we were young.

As a Greek-Australian child with a hardly-at-all Greek and very-much-Australian upbringing, we didn't eat a whole lot of Greek food at home. But the Greek food I do remember eating left a very memorable impression on me – food like Pastitsio and Youvetsi.

Pastitsio is a pasta bake, usually made with macaroni or penne pasta at the base, then covered with a minced meat and tomato sauce, and topped with a thick layer of béchamel and cheese.

Youvetsi is a hot-pot casserole dish made with lamb shanks, slow cooked in a fragrant tomato-based sauce with a risoni or orzo type pasta.

I remember these family favourites well but being meat-based dishes, I haven't eaten either of them for many years.

Reminiscing and longing for the flavours of youvetsi and pastitsio, I started thinking about ways to vegetarianise these dishes. The main flavours in youvetsi come from the tomatoes and spices in the sauce, so replacing the meat was all that was required.

Cauliflower is a vegetable I don't use much in cooking, but it is eaten widely in Greek cuisine. It also holds together reasonably well when cooked at length and absorbs flavours like a sponge so I thought it would work well with youvetsi.

To create a deeper flavour, I decided to roast the cauliflower first. I made up a simple mix of spices with a bit of garlic, lemon and olive oil and roasted the florets until they were golden and sizzling. Of course I couldn't just throw these into the youvetsi without trying one first, and Oh My God. These were so yum.

Before I knew it, I'd eaten half of my star ingredient! What was left wasn't enough to add to the youvetsi so I ended up eating the rest with my dinner that night and made another batch the next day. I'm telling you, these roasted cauliflower florets were so delicious I'm going to write a separate post on them. But back to the youvetsi.

Youvetsi is traditionally cooked in a lidded casserole dish in the oven for several hours, mainly to slow-cook the meat so it ends up falling off the bone. This being a meatless Youvetsi means it's not necessary to cook this dish in the oven, although I'm sure the Youvetsi police would still be horrified to know I cooked mine over the stove. I probably could have cooked this in the oven but being a bit of a control freak I like to look and stir and generally hover over a pot of sauce while it's cooking, rather than just trust the oven to do this for me. Especially when the oven has a broken seal (yet another problem with this house!).

I did, however, use genuine Greek kritharaki (risoni).

The rest of the recipe stays true to most versions of youvetsi I've seen, and certainly tastes a lot like the youvetsi I remember as a child – a hearty pasta casserole for a cold winter's night, with a rich tomato sauce, hints of cinnamon and lots of grated cheese on top.

So what about Pastitsio? You will have to wait for my next post to see what I've come up with to vegetarianise this Greek family staple. It's based on a recipe of my mum's that is so full of flavour you wouldn't even know the meat was missing.