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Essentially a Greek Lasagna which is delicious (I've also had some very yummy vegan versions before).
- Evie

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The Best Greek Pastitsio recipe (Pastichio)! An authentic Greek Lasagna dish to recreate this traditional delight just like my grandma used to make it! So go ahead, indulge yourself to this little sin.

What is Greek Pastitsio / Pastichio?

For the traditional pastitsio / Pasticcio recipe, layers of pasta, juicy minced beef and velvety béchamel sauce are baked together to create the ultimate Greek comfort food! Along with the legendary dish moussaka of course. The beef is cooked in a tomato sauce along with aromatic spices. The traditional Greek pastitsio / pastichio recipe is what most people call "Greek lasagna". And the beef sauce is similar to Italian Bolognese.

How to make traditional Greek Pastitsio?

Although it can be a challenging dish to prepare we summed up all the steps in three core steps so that you can easily make the very best pastitsio on your first try! This easy to follow Greek pastitsio recipe can be summarised in three stages: cooking the pasta mixture, preparing the meat filling and preparing the béchamel. Truth is that the whole process will require dirtying some pans, but the end result is well worth it.

Greek Pastitsio recipe - Prepare the pasta

The authentic Greek Pastitsio recipe is made with bucatini pasta, a thick pasta like spaghetti with a hole running through the center. This is how you will eat the dish in almost every Greek household or restaurant. You could also substitude with ziti pasta or penne if you prefer. The pasta base for this pastitsio recipe is mixed with Greek feta cheese and enriched with its sharp and distinctive taste. Just be careful to cook the pasta for the pastitsio 2-3 minutes less than the package instructions, so that they don't get mushy after turning out of the oven later.

Greek Pastitsio recipe - Prepare the meat sauce

Greek pastitsio (pastichio/pasticcio/Pastizio) owes its distinctive and rich flavour to the two aromatic spices used in the meat sauce of the traditional pastitsio recipe, which are cinnamon and clove. Once put in the oven, the intense aromas of those spices bring back childhood memories. To prepare the meat sauce for this pastitsio recipe, the ground beef is sautéed in olive oil, flavoured with onions and garlic and then simmered in red wine and tomato sauce. Let your sauce simmer for a while to allow the flavours to mingle.

Greek Pastitsio recipe - Prepare the Béchamel sauce

The perfect béchamel sauce for your pastitsio should be smooth and creamy. To achieve the perfect texture the key is to add the milk (lukewarm) a little bit at a time whilst constantly stirring with a hand whisk. Whisk the sauce constantly and allow each time the flour to absorb the milk, so that it doesn't get lumpy. Cook the béchamel sauce over medium to low heat, so that it doesn't burn and doesn't stick on the bottom of the pan. Cook enough time, until you can't taste the flour and is thick enough. Once the béchamel sauce cools a bit and the grated cheese goes in, it will thicken a little bit. So keep that in mind to achieve the right texture. Even though it will be really hard, wait for a while until the pastitsio cools down, before cutting into pieces!

Can this Greek Pastitsio recipe Be made in Advance?

Making Greek Pastitsio can be a bit time consuming, so sometimes you will need to prepare it in advance.
If you like to prepare pastitsio in advance, you can prepare the different components the previous night. All the components can be stored in the fridge. Assemble the pastitisio the next day, when it's time to bake it. Another option is to assemble the pastitsio, but not to bake it immediately. Instead, cover the casserole dish with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge. Next day put it straight in the oven and bake, according to the recipe instructions (step 5.)

Can you freeze baked Pastitsio / Pasticcio?

This pastitsio recipe can also be cooked in advance and freeze individual portions. Truth is that sometimes you will end up with leftovers, as it is a recipe for a big crowd. If you are cooking for less, you could either cut the recipe in half, or even better have some extra pieces in the freezer. Freeze cooked pastitsio, after it has cooled. When ready to serve, thaw in the freeze the previous night. Next day heat the pastitsio in the oven at 180C, until is warmed up.

So go ahead, give this traditional Pastitsio recipe a try and amaze your friends and family with this extra tasty hearty dish!

Greek Pastitsio recipe (Greek Lasagna with Béchamel)

Author: Eli K. Giannopoulos

Yield: 8 1x

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Greek Pastitsio recipe (Greek Lasagna with Béchamel) - My Greek Dish

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The Best Greek Pastitsio recipe (Pastichio)! An authentic Greek Lasagna dish to recreate this traditional delight just like my grandma used to make it! So go ahead, indulge yourself to this little sin. For the traditional pastitsio / Pasticcio recipe, layers of pasta, juicy minced beef and velvety béchamel sauce are baked together to create the ultimate Greek comfort food!

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Gastrodiplomacy

At the beginning of the 21st century the Thai government launched a gastro-diplomacy campaign which aimed to increase the number of Thai restaurants around the world. (As well as celebrating the country’s delicacies, officials wanted to tempt tourists to visit.) For budding restaurateurs in Britain, setting up shop in a pub was seen as less risky than starting from scratch.

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F ROM THE outside, the Lemon Tree is an unassuming pub. Sitting on a quiet road in central London, it looks like many of the city's Georgian boozers. On the ground floor there are dark wooden furnishings, framed etchings and a bar offering local ales, imported lagers and pork scratchings. The traditional setting suggests a menu of pub grub such as burgers. A visitor to Britain's capital may be surprised by the culinary delights served upstairs.

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Squeeze past the gaggles of office workers and listen out for the sound of clanging woks and sizzling oil. Follow the enticing scent of frying aromatics and fish sauce, and you'll find a small Thai restaurant providing warming bowls of massaman curry and tall mounds of fried noodles. This is a cultural collaboration not unique to the Lemon Tree. Anglo-Thai grub was first dished out at the Churchill Arms in Kensington in 1991 and is now served in at least 30 taverns across London.

Often Thai cooks will rent a kitchen from a pub landlord in return for a stream of hungry customers. Ask a patron to explain why this arrangement seems to work, and you might notice his eyebrow flick upward, citing a hunch that the reason lies in some landlords' penchant for marrying Thai women. It is true that a study of Thai eateries in Britain found that more than 68% are run by women and that, according to the Home Office, wives received almost two-thirds of all settlement visas granted to Thais in the early 2000s. But the phenomenon of Thai kitchens in pubs is probably the result of commercial opportunities rather than romance.

At the beginning of the 21st century the Thai government launched a gastro-diplomacy campaign which aimed to increase the number of Thai restaurants around the world. (As well as celebrating the country's delicacies, officials wanted to tempt tourists to visit.) For budding restaurateurs in Britain, setting up shop in a pub was seen as less risky than starting from scratch. Landlords usually had dining space that was not being used effectively, which made it easy for entrepreneurial cooks to make a compelling business case.

Pubs may have poky kitchens, but that does not matter with this style of cooking. Many Thai dishes are based on street food and rely on a few versatile ingredients, including chillies, coconut milk, herbs, lime and tamarind. A flexible menu does not require a vast stockroom or counter space. It helps, too, that the flavoursome cuisine pairs superbly with beer and is quick to prepare. Dishes such as pad Thai, a particular British favourite, or seafood steeped in a glossy savoury sauce can be whipped up in a single wok in minutes.

Regardless of how it came to be, the popularity of Thai pub food reflects Londoners' open-mindedness as well as their desire for continuity. If you mess around with the formula of a quintessential pub too much, you risk unsettling regulars who take comfort in tradition. But that's not to say you cannot please them with the mouth-watering street food of Bangkok-so long as it is served with a pint of room-temperature bitter. ■
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Thai restaurateurs and British pubs have proved a perfect pairing

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F ROM THE outside, the Lemon Tree is an unassuming pub. Sitting on a quiet road in central London, it looks like many of the city's Georgian boozers. On the ground floor there are dark wooden furnishings, framed etchings and a bar offering local ales, imported lagers and pork scratchings.

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This is Tahdig--a crispy rice crust achieved by adding oil/butter/ghee to rice while cooking! Super tasty and you will never fail to find this in an Iranian household. There are some variations too, like noodle or rice tahdig

Diba - Iran

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NYT has an interactive quiz on the different varieties of American accent - would be interested in what non-Americans get on this

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What does the way you speak say about where you’re from? Answer all the questions below to see your personal dialect map.

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It is currently Obon season in Japan. It's one of the significant holiday periods and there are Obon festivals going on throughout the country, full of dancing and bonfires.
Learn more here: https://gogonihon.com/en/blog/what-is-obon/
Chiara

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What is Obon? A guide to the Japanese Spirit Festival - Go! Go! Nihon

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Blazing bonfires, all-night dance parties. Ghosts among the living. Learn all about Obon & how to celebrate Japan’s festival of the spirits.

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I'm just gonna post pictures of food in here

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When (not if) you go for a night out in South Wales, finish the festivities with an absorbing dish called half and half. Half chips, half rice topped with curry sauce. Carbtastic and a menu benchmark of a decent establishment.

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....sorry.

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It is probably the most over-used word in the United Kingdom: whether they are sorry about the weather or sorry because someone else has bumped into them, chances are your average Briton has blurted out at least one apology in the past hour or two.

A recent survey of more than 1,000 Brits found that that the average person says 'sorry' around eight times per day - and that one in eight people apologise up to 20 times a day.

"The readiness of the English to apologise for something they haven't done is remarkable, and it is matched by an unwillingness to apologise for what they have done," wrote Henry Hitchings in his aptly-titled Sorry!: The English and their Manners.

But do the British really apologise more frequently than members of other cultures? If so, what's the reason for this peculiar verbal tic... and how bad a habit is it?

Getting reliable data on the frequency of apologies in different countries is harder than you might think. "There's certainly speculation that Canadians and Brits apologise more than Americans, but it's difficult to study in a way that would provide any compelling evidence," says Karina Schumann, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh who studies apologies and forgiveness.

It's difficult to study the use of the word 'sorry' in a way that would provide compelling evidence (Credit: Alamy)

One approach is to ask people what they'd do in a theoretical situation. For instance, a recent YouGov poll of more than 1,600 British people and 1,000 Americans revealed that there would be approximately 15 British 'sorries' for every 10 American ones if they sneezed, if they corrected someone's mistake, or if someone crashed into them.

But the survey found similarities between the British and American respondents, as well: just under three-quarters of people from either country would say sorry for interrupting someone. And 84% of Brits would apologise for being late to a meeting, compared to 74% of Americans.
Do as I say, not as I do
However, asking someone what they'd do in a theoretical situation is very different to measuring what they'd do in real life. Take the last example; in the YouGov survey, 36% of British respondents said they would apologise for someone else's clumsiness, compared to 24% of Americans.

But in her book Watching the English, social anthropologist Kate Fox describes experiments in which she deliberately bumped into hundreds of people in towns and cities across England. She also encouraged colleagues to do the same abroad, for comparison.

Fox found that around 80% of English victims said 'sorry' - even though the collisions were clearly Fox's fault. Often the apology was mumbled, and possibly people said it without even realising it, but compared to when tourists from other countries were bumped, the difference was marked. "Only the Japanese seemed to have anything even approaching the English sorry-reflex," Fox writes.

The origins of the word 'sorry' can be traced to the Old English 'sarig' meaning "distressed, grieved or full of sorrow", but of course, most British people use the word more casually. And herein lies another problem with studying cultural differences in languages. "We use the word 'sorry' in different ways," says Edwin Battistella, a linguistics expert from Southern Oregon University and author of Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology. Brits might say sorry more often, but this doesn't necessarily mean they're more remorseful.

"We can use it to express empathy - so I might say 'sorry about the rain'," says Battistella. "It might be that British and Canadian speakers use that kind of 'sorry' more often, but they wouldn't be apologising, per se. Other researchers have talked about the use of 'sorry' to communicate across social classes, where you're sort of apologising for your privilege."

British society values that its members show respect without imposing on someone else's personal space, and without drawing attention to oneself: characteristics that linguists refer to as "negative-politeness" or "negative-face". America, on the other hand, is a positive-politeness society, characterised by friendliness and a desire to feel part of a group.

As a consequence, Brits may sometimes use 'sorry' in a way that can seem inappropriate to outsiders, including Americans. The British will say 'sorry' to someone they don't know because they'd like to ask for some information, or to sit down next to them - and because not saying 'sorry' would constitute an even greater invasion of that stranger's privacy.

"Our excessive, often inappropriate and sometimes downright misleading use of this word devalues it, and it makes things very confusing and difficult for foreigners unaccustomed to our ways," says Fox. Still, she adds, "I don't think saying sorry all the time is such a bad thing. It even makes sense in the context of a negative-politeness culture... Of all the words that a nation could choose to scatter about with such random profligacy, surely 'sorry' is not the worst."

Does the excessive - even inappropriate - use of the word 'sorry' devalue it? (Credit: Alamy)

There may be other benefits to saying 'sorry', too - such as fostering trust. Interestingly, that is true even when people are apologising not for mistakes they've made, but rather for circumstances beyond their control.

In one study, Harvard Business School's Alison Wood Brooks and her colleagues recruited a male actor to approach 65 strangers at a US train station on a rainy day and ask to borrow their telephone. In half the cases, the stranger preceded his request with: "Sorry about the rain". When he did this, 47% of strangers gave him their mobile, compared to only 9% when he simply asked to borrow their phone. Further experiments confirmed it was the apology about the weather that mattered, not the politeness of the opening sentence.

"By saying 'I'm sorry about the rain', the superfluous apologiser acknowledges an unfortunate circumstance, takes the victim's perspective and expresses empathy for the negative circumstance - even though it is outside of his or her control," says Wood Brooks.

Of course, the British aren't the only group known for being apologetic. Women are often presumed to be, too.

To test if this stereotype stood up to scrutiny, Schumann recruited a group of university students to keep a journal for 12 days. They listed every situation they encountered where they felt an apology was deserved and whether or not one had been given. She found that the women did say 'sorry' more often than the men, but they also reported more offenses when they thought an apology was needed - both for when they were the victim and when they were the perpetrator. When this was taken into account, men and women proved equally likely to apologise for their transgressions. "It's not so much that men are unwilling to apologise; it's just that they're seeing fewer offenses that deserve an apology," Schumann says.
A sign of weakness?
So what about those circumstances when we are aware that we genuinely owe someone an apology? Is it better to swallow your pride and say you're sorry, or - as the legendary American actor John Wayne put it - is apologising a sign of weakness?

"People worry that an apology will serve as an admission of liability, rather than as an effort to empathise with the wronged party," says Wood Brooks. But she adds "effective apologies address the recipients' feelings - they don't prove a point. A good apology is unlikely to backfire, and is more likely to increase trust than not apologising at all."

An effective apology addresses the recipients' feelings - and is likely to increase trust more than not apologising at all (Credit: Alamy)

As for how to do it, Battistella has the following advice: "The right way to apologise is the way your mother taught you." Say you threw a stone at a sibling. "She'd have you go and look them in the eye in the eye and say: 'I'm sorry I threw the stone at you and I won't do it again'. It's important to name what you did wrong, to show yourself as being penitent in some way and to indicate what might be different in the future," Battistella says.

Just how many times you'll need to repeat the apology may vary according to where you live. Wood Brooks and Harvard PhD student Grant Donnelly have collected preliminary data that suggests that, for a minor transgression, the optimal number is a single "I'm sorry".

"If the transgression is large, then making two apologies seems to be the magic number for conveying empathy, remorse and restoring trust and liking," Wood Brooks says.

Of course, if you're British, you may need to double that. "A single 'sorry' does not count as an apology: we have to repeat it and embellish it with a lot of adjectives," says Fox.

Apologise for the rain while you're at it, too.

Follow BBC Future on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. This story is a part of BBC Britain - a series focused on exploring this extraordinary island, one story at a time. Readers outside of the UK can see every BBC Britain story by heading to the Britain homepage; you also can see our latest stories by following us on Facebook and Twitter.

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It is probably the most over-used word in the United Kingdom: whether they are sorry about the weather or sorry because someone else has bumped into them, chances are your average Briton has blurted out at least one apology in the past hour or two.

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British people often hate talking to strangers/on public transport etc, particularly Londoners!

Celine - UK

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As the "Tube Chat" campaign terrifies Londoners, YouGov examines public attitudes to talking to a stranger on public transport

Last week a man called Jonathan Dunne caused outrage in London by launching a campaign called "Tube Chat". Dunne - an American - handed out badges that passengers were supposed to wear to indicate that they were up for a conversation, causing a Twitter backlash as horrified Londoners reacted to the prospect of having to talk to their fellow human beings.

Following the incident, YouGov asked people across Britain how they would feel about a normal-seeming person trying to strike up a friendly conversation with them on public transport. At 57%, Scots would be the most pleased for a stranger to strike up a chat on public transport, as would about half of people in the North, Midlands/Wales and the South outside London

Unsurprisingly, given the response to Tube Chat, Londoners were the least likely to be pleased by someone trying to start a conversation with them at just 37%.

Londoners' reluctance to talk on public transport is not down to hostility - just 6% say a stranger chatting to them would make them irritated, about the same as the rest of the country. Instead, just over a quarter of Londoners (27%) say that a stranger talking to them would make them feel uncomfortable - almost twice as high as in the North, the area of the UK where the fewest people would be uncomfortable (15%).

Part of the reason could be London's younger age profile. Younger people are the most likely to say that a stranger talking to them on public transport would make them feel uncomfortable (30% for 18-24 year olds and 26% for 25-39 year olds). This dropped to just 18% for those aged between 40 and 59, and 12% for those older than 60.

Nevertheless, there is hope for the Tube Chat campaign. Every single demographic group - even London - contains more people who would be pleased than uncomfortable and/or irritated for someone to start talking to them on public transport.

Photo: Tube Chat

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Londoners are the most embarassed by talking to strangers | YouGov

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As theTube Chatcampaign terrifies Londoners, YouGov examines public attitudes to talking to a stranger on public transport

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There is an entire article dedicated to how to lie to your Iranian hosts!

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There is an entire article dedicated to how to lie to your Iranian hosts!

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If you're ever offering something to an Iranian person and they say no...ask at least 3 more times!

Diba - Iran