Very fortunate to be joined this week by my partner and much-more-serious cook Harry, who made a “timpano” for Christmas, as he will explain:

The timpano (Calabrian dialect) or timballo was made famous by the movie Big Night. If you saw the movie, you know the timpano is a feast for the eyes. On Christmas Day 2010 we set out to see if it tastes as good as it looks. Producing a timpano is not hard, but it is labor intensive. Many of the ingredients can be prepared ahead of time, with simple assembly on the day it is to be cooked. The only tricky part is rolling out (what was for our timpano a 30” in diameter round of) pasta dough. Ours was a three person effort with my wife preparing most of the ingredients, and my son and I rolling out the dough and performing final assembly. Think of the timpano as a luxurious, decadent lasagna-pasta dough encasing layers of pasta, tomato sauce, salami, provolone and pecorino cheeses, hard boiled eggs, and meat balls. Then baked in an oven heated to a temperature of about 120°F.

We were not disappointed, the finished product was perfect in appearance and taste.

Rushed meal, all of us coming home from various places.  No time for anything fancy (like visit to fish market, etc.).  Crumster just took frozen scallops, sauteed with garlic and parsley, and served on whole wheat penne.  Not because whole wheat penne is so terrific; unlike many whole-grain-ish products it tastes like a bad adaptation.  But it fit the Mediterranean-diet construct that is powering (hopefully) my next phase of weight loss.

There it is on the plate, just before eating.  Very tasty, even though nothing special.  Served with tossed salad.

So, Mara’s back from Africa for the next few weeks, and this has induced a flurry of CrummyCooking.  Up from once a week more-or-less to two or three times a week.

This last week I got some cod at Black Salt (not the same without the very impressive MJ there, I must say), and got more than I needed.  Debbie baked the cod, but we had quite a bit left over.

Something inspired me to make it into cod croquettes, which are (in this case) sauteed patties of fish together with onions, spices, and “binder” (in this case, mashed potato).

Here are the croquettes coming out of the fridge, ready to be sauteed.

Here is Mara with the salad.

We also had Brussels Sprouts browned in butter-and-oil, but they were a bit underdone.

Croquettes were very fragile even after cooking, but tasted great.

Debbie’s been hankering to have this dish at home since she had it at Nobu in New York, and doubly so since the Careful Cook Mary made it a year ago at her house.

I’ve begun to buy my fish where Josh and Mary do – Black Salt Fish Market in the Palisades – the really good guy MJ who is the manager of the market told me the other day that fresh black cod was in.  I was in!

There are a bunch of Nobu-esque recipes for this dish on the web (which is why I call it “a la Nobu” here); I used this one from foodandwine.com since it seemed to have the chef’s imprimatur on it.

What I didn’t realize before I brought the cod home is that it has to be marinated at least overnight to get the taste.  The recipe says it should even be marinated more, although Josh told me that would just make it taste salty.  So we let it sit overnight and had it last night.

Here’s the cod on the plate just before consumption.  It was really delicious.  It’s a great silky unctuous fish to begin with – basically the sable of my childhood, which, along with smoked salmon, smoked whitefish, and smoked sturgeon, were the set pieces of a visit to my grandma’s house – and the marinade hits my sweet-and-salty spot perfectly.

It was not as elegant-looking as Mary’s.   She got all the marinade off before grilling (where I just got most) and got it to look as silky and elegant as it tastes.  Anyhow, great dish.

We had broccoli with garlic-infused olive oil and salad on the side.

My zeal for WeightWatchers has been flagging in the last few weeks, and, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself, it’s that I have to pick a new diet every 6-12 months.  Something about the new diet restores my obsessiveness and zeal to adhere.  Serial monogamy with diets, I guess.  In any case, it has worked so far.

So the latest thing I’m going to try is the “Mediterrean diet”.

I ordered "The Mediterrean Prescription" from Amazon using my sophisticated algorithm of picking the most popular book that meets my search criteria (“Mediterrean Diet”).

And for this week’s CrummyCook I searched for “Mediterrean Chicken” on WeightWatchers and came up with a recipe for Greek Lemon-Chicken Thighs and Potatoes.  Basically marinate chicken thighs (boneless & skinless of course) in a lemon-oregano marinade and bake with small potatoes.   I only had chicken breasts, but what the heck.

When Debbie saw the marinating chicken, she said “why not have Avgolemno soup to start"?  She’s big on starting with soup after coming back from Canyon Ranch, where soup quells the demon of gluttony in part.  So I looked up egg and lemon soup in the Joy of Cooking, and it was pretty simple.  Cook rice in chicken stock and slowly stir in an egg and lemon mixture.

Voila!  Not too shabby.  Needed salt, but tasted pretty good.

Not so much the main dish.  It tasted like diet food: light on fats and heavy on lemon and oregano.  And I overcooked the chicken breasts (which, of course, turn to sawdust at the drop of a hat).  Not terrible, but not my best effort either.

Home alone last night (Debbie is at a Grand Spa which she describes as an elegant 24/7 gym) and wanted to use some feta we got last weekend at the farmers’ market.  I’ve also had a yen for some time to have stuffed peppers (which Debbie hates for some reason; she is not keen on peppers except raw in salads).

Epicurious to the rescue with Couscous and Feta Stuffed Peppers, an old SELF Magazine where I jacked up the oil to some extent and used fully-leaded chicken stock (in fact I used some kind of “Chicken Garlic Soup” from Whole Foods which looked enough like stock for the Crumster’s purposes.

I’ve always been big on the idea of getting all the ingredients ready before commencing to cook.  I now know (thanks to "Cooking for Geeks") that the French call this mise en scene (as the billboard used to say in Harvard Square when I was young, “Whatever it is it sounds better in French”), so I’ve been practicing proper mise en scene for years without knowing it.

In any case, here’s the mise en scene for the stuffed peppers.  Pepper cases on the left, stuffing parts on the right.

They came out well.  Very tasty.  Although the woman who sold us the feta told us we could wash it in fresh water and make it less salty, I left it pretty salty because I love salt, and it was veggie and salty and crunchy all at once.  Great meal.

From WeightWatchers (For Men, for some reason) Online, I did the Tuscan Casserole recipe because I had leftover black bean soup and ricotta.  They called for canned cannellini beans, and I tried to talk myself into substituting the black bean soup, finally decided it would taste too gross, and opened a can of kidney beans (closest I had to what they asked).

A not-too-flattering photo of the innards of it (Oh, I put home-made croutons (a CrummyCook regular nowadays as the solution to Terminal Bread Syndrome) on top instead of the torn-up bread pieces they called for.  You get the idea, sort of a diet veggie casserole kind of thing.  Not bad.