Mara taxes me regularly with being too hung-up on following recipes.  She would have been proud of me tonight!

I had a yen for meatballs, and we had a bag of frozen turkey meatballs from Whole Foods sitting around, calling to me.  I looked up “turkey meatballs” in Epicurious, and the few recipes that came back were tough and demanding.  The last thing you want on Sunday night.

Well, I saw a number of recipes pairing meatballs with tomato sauce, and I looked in the fridge and saw leftover Harissa dressing from a previous Crummy-Cook exploit.  I thought, “let’s put the Harissa dressing on the meatballs”.  Then I thought, “that’s a bit intense, let’s cut them with something.”  Inside the fridge, the Greek yogurt spoke to me.  I mixed the yogurt with the Harissa and cooked it with the meatballs: a star is born!

Not sure of the conventions here, but I’ll err on the side of punctilio until I figure out the lay of the land.

Last night (still alone :-() I got hung up on tofu, but also sick of the usual stuff.  One of the few areas of cooking I knew something about pre-Crummy-Cook-vow was Chinese stir-fry cooking, and I just wasn’t in the mood last night.

A recipe for Spinach and Tofu from Deborah Madison (famous, in our household at least, for the her connection with Moosewood Cookbook and its progeny) caught my fancy.

I’m one of the few people in my zip code who has actually made paneer from scratch, so Saag Paneer, the ur-dish on which this is based, is a household favorite.

I cheated.  I made it with frozen chopped spinach.  It still tasted great.

From Epicurious.  Pretty darn simple, really tasty.

The problem of making perfect grilled eggplant remains, but I got a little better at it this time.

Josh (my non-crummy cook friend, not my son) says you should salt the eggplant first (removing the salt before action, of course).  Salted eggplant is to oil as toast is to butter.  It absorbs the oil but doesn’t get all soggy.

Garlic problem solved.  This garlic peeler, from Sur La Table, eliminates the garlic-peeling problem  You put a clove inside, roll the tube around until the garlic clove crackles, and, voila, the peel comes off.

Mara, Debbie, and I ate at home on Friday, with Ellie as a guest.  Two dishes – both from Epicurious, need I say?

The Grilled Summer Vegetables with Harissa Dressing could be made in advance, so I grilled them in the midst of a Djibouti-like Washington DC summer day.  One goofup, which worked out okay: the “Harissa Dressing” is harissa powder whisked into oil and lemon juice basically.  I thought that some stuff called “Harissa” at Whole Foods was just the powder in oil.  Turns out – and, dummy me, I didn’t see it until after I had mixed it with lemon juice – that the major ingredient in the Whole Foods stuff is tomato.  Mara tasted it, however, and said it tasted like sun-ripened tomato and would be OK as a dressing.  So it was.

So I really only had to assemble the grilled veggies at meal time.  I guess this is my first experience plating.

The other dish, Shrimp and Pancetta on Polenta, was pretty tasty for how easy it was.  Just make some quick polenta (we do it in the microwave, per Debbie, with one part polenta to 4 parts water) and cook the other stuff in a pan.

Here’s what Ellie wrote the next day:

Thanks for the dinner.  I loved the shrimp, polenta dish.  I came home and read the crummy blog.  I gather that pancetta can be tricky.  Nice to visit . ellie

I guess that’ll do in lieu of criticism/self-criticism.

Back in form this week, I made two simultaneous involved dishes.  Well, maybe not that involved.  But involved enough.

Main dish was Caramel Fish Filets, from Mark Bittman.  Since he doesn’t publish his own recipes online, see fellow blogger Boots in the Oven for the recipe.

Basically you melt sugar until it caramelizes, put in a bunch of other stuff, and cook the fish in it.

The other dish was from my partner Harry, who is a serious Italian-authentic cook.  He recommended rendering some pancetta, browning garlic in it, and tossing it over peas.

OK.  Neither of these is daunting to our halfway-through-the-year Crummy Cook.  But together, they presented some complications.

I put in the pancetta first.  I was going to get it crispy, take it out, cook the garlic, toss it with the peas, and then reheat the peas right before Debbie and I ate.

But I got so bogged down with melting the sugar (sugar as in caramelizing scares the bejeezus out of me) that the pancetta burned.  I had these four disks of completely blackened pancetta, and not much time to decide what to do.  Fortunately I had more dry powder, so I put in four more disks and ate the evidence (the blackened ones, not too bad by my standards).

Everything settled down.  The fish turned out well – it’s sweet, sour, and fish-saucy, a even spicy (although next time I’ll use chili pepper instead of black pepper) – and the peas were decent (although I want to work next time on getting the pancetta more tender; it still didn’t work out completely right).

Debbie was pleased, and I let deeper criticism/self-criticism slide for the night.

Well, one thing followed another, and there’s no suitable meal for the Crummy Cook this weekend.

Friday I was coming back from a one-day trip to Atlanta, Debbie offered to cook and I didn’t say no.

Saturday we decided to try a hip Japanese in the “new” K St (I put “new” in quotes because it may only be new to the New York Times and us).  Great food, but not produced by me.

And tonight we’re going over to friends’.

Debbie and I cooked together Friday night, she just back from10 days on the road.

We had a boatload of veggies of different kinds, including the “stretch” eggplant, old cauliflower, a big zucchini (supposed to be less tender, per Debbie and others), a package of pre-sliced mushrooms.

So Debbie suggests we make ratatouille, which I look up in Mark Bittman.  He says it’s a pretty loosey-goosey dish, very tolerant of variations.  Debbie agrees.  This only redoubles my Monk-ish wish to exactly follow orders, so I follow Mark as closely as I can.  Unfortunately, I forget to put in tomatoes which, Debbie tells me afterward during criticism-and-self-criticism, is one of the anchor tenants of the dish’s flavor.  Oh well.  It was kind of bland, although the textures were pretty good.

She put in some crushed tomatoes from a open box, and we’ll try them this morning with scrambled eggs.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love the taste of garlic.  But garlic as a food to be prepared?  Fugettaaboutdit.  The husk around the garlic cloves is gnarly and refractory.  I hit it and hit it with the heel of the knife, and it’s still hard to peel.  And then the garlic sticks to your fingers and your knife as you cut it.

I would take pre-minced garlic any day of the week.  But Debbie forbids it in our house.  Maybe she’s right.  But can someone please intervene with The Management to make garlic easier to work with?

All this because I had to chop up a couple of cloves of garlic for the Eggplant and garlic lettuce cups recipe I made from Epicurious.  (Our “stretch vegetable” for the week was an eggplant, and I bought a tub of pre-cut mushroom on an impulse in the Whole Foods.)