For the most part, I live a very quiet life – the life of a 60-something retired person. Predictable and nonstressful, and definitely not funny.

Every once in a while, God throws some kinks into my life just to keep me on my toes. That happened to me last week.

It all started the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, while having lunch with Court. Our server brought the bill to our table. I opened up my billfold and couldn’t help but notice a big empty space WHERE MY CREDIT CARD SHOULD BE.

“Do you remember where you used the card last?” Court asked calmly, trying to prevent me from full-out panic.

I did. The day before, I had gone to Toys R Us to pick up a package I had ordered. I paid with the credit card. There had been a lot of excitement as another shopper had been hungrily looking at the Zoomer Dino that I was buying. Zoomer Dinos are apparently going to be one of those “Cabbage Patch Doll” phenomenons this year. (Baby Boomers will remember the Cabbage Patch craze and how parents and grandparents were tearing dolls out of other people’s hands in toy stores in the 1980s.) I was prepared to take the lady to the floor for the Zoomer Dino if necessary. It didn’t happen, but I was distracted nonetheless.

So when I noted the absence of my card, I suspected Toys R Us immediately. Particularly since after leaving Toys R Us that day, my car once again wouldn’t start. Same issue as the previous week that, almost $700 later, the car service people told me they had fixed but clearly hadn’t. I called Bill, who told me what cables I needed to jiggle and voila!, the car started.( I love being nearly 61 and having to start my car by opening up the hood and jiggling cables. I feel like I’m back in college.)

The credit card story has a happy ending, though, because when I went back to Toys R Us, the nice young man who had helped me the day before was delighted to see me. He said he had chased after me upon realizing I left my card on the counter, but couldn’t see what car I was getting into. He clearly disregarded the possibility that it could be the yellow bug with the hood up and the owner madly jiggling cables. He had placed the card in the store safe, and before long, it was back in the little space in my billfold.

But the blimps in my life weren’t over yet.

The next day (which was the day before Thanksgiving), I was – yes, I’m afraid I must tell you this – doing my last last shop before the holiday. I remembered that morning that I had thrown my old turkey baster away long ago as it was cracked. There were also a few odds and ends that I could have lived without, but as long as I was going to the store, well…..

Before even entering the store, I spotted lovely evergreen wreathes. I put two particularly pretty ones in my basket. I proceeded to do the rest of my shopping. Now, I prefer to leave my shopping cart at the end of the aisle rather than trying to maneuver it between carts in the narrow space. I did so, and picked up maybe six or seven other things. I put them in my cart and went to the check stand to pay.

The lines were predictably long, so I settled in to wait my turn. I began thinking about how lovely my wreathes were, and looked down at them. Unfortunately, rather than seeing two pretty evergreen wreathes, I instead saw a variety of wholly unfamiliar items, including two or three sacks of sweet potatoes.

Whaaaaat?

I suddenly realized what had happened. I had inadvertently confiscated someone else’s basket. I immediately worked my way past the people behind me in line. “Excuse me. Pardon me. Excuse me,” I said to several quite unfriendly shoppers.

When I got to the back of the store where I had last seen my buggy, I saw a very distraught woman who was speaking with great angst to two store employees. “I really, really don’t want to have to start over with my shopping,” she was saying.

I admitted the error of my ways and apologized profusely. She, I’m happy to say, couldn’t have been nicer. It had happened to her before, as it has to many of us. And there was my very own cart with the two evergreen wreathes.

But I’m not quite finished with my tale.

I took my groceries out to the car, and filled my trunk. I began to roll my cart over to the cart stand. As I neared the stand, suddenly the cart’s wheels froze. I tried backing up. Nothing. I tried rolling forward. Nothing. They were firmly stuck in place.

I recalled the signs on the shopping carts that tell you not to take the carts beyond the parking lot as they wheels won’t roll. I never actually believed them. I’m here to tell you that it’s true, my friends. Never mind that I wasn’t even close to being out of the parking lot. In fact, I was only about 10 feet from the cart stand. I must admit I simply abandoned the cart. I blame it on Google.

Aside from realizing on Thanksgiving morning that I had accidentally purchased a 19 lb. turkey instead of a 15 lb. turkey to feed the six people at my Thanksgiving table, everything else went as smooth as silk. As for the 19 lbs. of turkey, after sending home leftovers with my guests, there was only enough turkey left for one more meal….turkey pot pies.

Back in 1996, there was a critically-well-received movie – called Big Night –that featured two brothers from the Abruzzo region of Italy who were trying to make a go of an Italian-American restaurant someplace in New Jersey, but were failing miserably. I have spoken before in this blog about the difference in food you eat in Italy and its Italian-American counterpart. Well, in the story, the brother who was the chef wanted to continue to make truly Italian food, but the other brother – who ran the business – saw the handwriting on the wall and knew that to be successful, they were going to have to change their cooking ways and begin offering the kinds of Italian cooking Americans want. Drama (and clever comedy) ensues.

Enough said about the plot (it’s a wonderful movie; you should rent it sometime if you can find it), but a featured event in the movie – and the single thing people who watched the movie still talk about — was the chef/brother’s (played by Tony Shalhoub) preparation of something traditionally called a timballo in Italy, but referred to as a timpano in the movie.

I had come across this domed pasta masterpiece before via Bec’s daughter Kate who had sent her mom a photo years ago and basically said, “I don’t know what this is, but I think you should make it sometime.”

That was a bunch of years ago, but it has been on my mind since. To illustrate this fact, please note that last winter I bought a timpano bowl (which I show here with a wine bottle in it so that you can see how large it is, 15 inches to be exact), with the intention of trying my hand at preparing a timpano.

A timpano is a domed (shaped like timpani drums) pasta extravaganza. It is literally layer after layer of everything you like at an Italian restaurant wrapped in a layer of pasta and baked. It is, as you can imagine, massive, but oh-so-beautiful when it emerges from the oven and you turn it over onto a platter and it sliced open. Abbondanza!

So I have been waiting for just the right time to prepare said timpano. It is, after all, enormous, so it had to be for a large number of people. Also, it is such a, well, thing, to prepare because of all of the various layers and kinds of food that goes into it, so it wouldn’t be anything I would want to prepare all by myself. Such an opportunity never seemed to present itself.

But leave it to my sister Jen to make it happen.

She is here in AZ visiting and it became apparent that Sunday was going to be a day when all of the female family members were going to be spouseless. Golf, football, and/or NASCAR had claimed all of the male members for the day. A gathering of the estrogen crowd seemed in order.

“Let’s do a timpano!” she cried.

“Yikes,” I responded. It seemed an overwhelming amount of work. And an overwhelming amount of food for our gathering of nine women and a scattering of kids.

But upon further research and a great deal of discussion, we decided it would be doable if we made a simplified version. Store-bought marinara, frozen meatballs, etc., and wrapped in store-bought pizza dough instead of homemade pasta dough.

Food Network chef Sandra Lee would call it semi-homemade, but then she would go off to make a matching tablescape, something we did not do. Wouldn’t happen. Not that day. Not any day.

But back to the timpano.

We followed a recipe, but we used it only as a guideline. As I said, while the traditional timpano is lined with a homemade pasta dough, we chose to line it instead with pizza dough, and storebought (from the can) at that.

Then we commenced to begin layering – a layer of cooked ziti in a marinara sauce, a layer of cooked Italian sausage, a layer of mozzarella cheese, a layer of meatballs, a layer of grated pecorino cheese, some beaten egg over it all, a layer of tomato sauce. Repeat. Your bowl is filled.

Bake at 350 degrees for an hour-and-a-half, then remove from the oven and let it sit until you can no longer stand to not see what it looks like. Turn it over onto a very large platter, and then commence patting yourself on the back. It’s beautiful. Especially when you cut it open.

And it’s delicious. Remember how I said it was going to be too much food. Well, nope. We didn’t eat the entire thing, but food was taken home, allegedly for the spouses, but I can’t confirm there wasn’t some midnight snacking. My niece is nine months pregnant, after all.

Here is a link to the recipe. The recipe is complicated as the author makes the marina, meatballs and pasta dough from scratch. I’m going to do that someday, but in the meantime, we had a delicious Italian extravaganza and a lot of fun to boot.

Here’s some photos….

I’m preparing the pizza dough in the bowl.

Layer after layer of goodness.

Out of the oven. We’re just about to begin the unveiling, and required everyone to knock on the bowl for good luck. Not an Italian tradition!

Jen and Bec begin the unveiling….

Voila!

Nana’s Notes: Our pizza layer was VERY THIN, and because of this, perhaps a bit overcooked in the oven. I think if I was going to do it again and still didn’t want to make homemade pasta, I would make the pizza dough a bit thicker so that it totally encased the pasta.