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In a saucepan, combine the shredded goat and braising liquid, lemon juice, dill, parsley, and Garlic Purée. Over medium-high heat, stir the mixture until hot.

With a 3-inch cutter, cut out 12 disks from the Hilopites Pasta sheet. Cook the pasta disks until pliable. Reserve on a lightly oiled sheet of parchment.

Place a spoonful of the warm béchamel on each plate and spread into a 3-inch circle. Top with 1 disk of pasta, 2 slices of eggplant, 2 to 3 slices of potato, and a spoonful of the goat meat (use a slotted spoon, to drain the liquid), keeping everything in a circle. Top with another spoonful of béchamel, another pasta disk, eggplant slices, potato slices, and a spoonful of goat, as before. Make a third layer, then finish with a final spoonful of béchamel. Repeat for the other three plates. Drizzle the remaining goat pan juices around the moussaka. Toss the frisée with lemon, oil, salt, and pepper, and place around the edges of each plate. Drizzle everything with a little olive oil and season with a little more sea salt and cracked black pepper.

psilakis birthday dinners

Don’t get me wrong, I loved birthday gifts just as much as the next kid. But if you asked any of my siblings, I think they’d all agree that, for us, birthdays weren’t about the gifts from our parents. Birthdays were really about the family dinners that marked the special day of our birth. The best gift was the honor of getting to choose the meal the whole family would have for dinner on that one day each year. Because dinner was the only time each day that was guaranteed to bring us all together, these birthday dinners held a special meaning, particularly to us kids. Choosing that one special meal, whatever we wanted, was sacrosanct.

In our family, food was far more than calories and nutrients. Food was the reason my parents left behind their homes, the country and friends they loved, and the language they knew for a new and unknown country where getting enough to eat would not represent the difference between life and death. The promise of a better life in America meant to my parents, literally, not starving. It’s difficult to relate to those circumstances today given the bounty most of us know in America. This meant to my parents that every meal they put on the table had a spiritual dimension. We Psilakis children knew almost from birth that in our home food represented love.

For our birthday dinner, it became comical how each of the four of us would choose the same dish, year after year, to the point where each of those dishes became associated with the child who chose it. For me, until I became a teenager and my tastes shifted somewhat (and rebellion set in), that dish was always giouvarlakia, meatball soup.

My mother would take ground beef, mix it with uncooked rice, and form it into golf-ball-sized meatballs. She’d boil the meatballs in a pot of water seasoned with bay leaf and onions, until the rice was cooked. As the rice and meat cooked, they suffused the water with starch from the former and the juices from the latter. The meatballs bounced around in the boiling water, agitating like billiard balls knocking against one another. After about an hour and a half, so much flavor had been released from the meatballs that those simple ingredients transformed mere water into my favorite soup.

But it was the avgolemono sauce that transformed the soup into my favorite meal. My mother would take egg whites, to which she added lemon juice and dill, and whip them into stiff peaks. She’d temper the yolks with some of the soup from the pot and fold them into the peaked egg whites. The whites and yolks together made avgolemono, which she poured into the boiling soup. The addition of the avgolemono to the boiling soup created so much foam and froth that it was like adding bubble bath to a Jacuzzi.

When that pot of soup, made just for me with so much joy and love, was presented to the table, I felt like the guest of honor at a royal banquet. I felt celebrated and cherished,