July 19th 2025
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Houston, we have a table 🙌🏻 Nearly 6 months after our kitchen renovation was completed, our dinning room table finally arrived. Might not sound like a big deal, but having a meal where everyone is sitting down all at once was pure magic 💖
Sunday Gravy
Another Sunday, another gravy. Mark continues to tweak this dish (first featured two weeks ago). Instead of pork chops, we did short ribs this time, and instead of mild Italian sausage we went hot 🔥 The sausage was incredible, the short ribs needed more time. And as always, Grandma Lucille’s meatballs were absolutely perfect.
Chopped Italian Salad
To quote Jake, “this is like an entire Italian hoagie, in a salad.” Yes, Jake. YES! Recipe from Nancy Silverton (and her cookbook Mozza). The salad features iceberg lettuce, radicchio, salami, provolone, cherry tomatoes, red onions, peperoncini, chickpeas, and a garlic, oregano forward vinaigrette. The recipe calls for Sicilian oregano - so of course we obliged, and it was so fragrant and worth it. We topped everything at the table with it!
Strawberry Peach Galette
The strawberries are still in season and speaking to me. Every farmer’s market I go to (and boy do we have a lot in Mill Valley) they are still sparkling red and juicy - and the same was true with the peaches this week. So as long as they continue to be that perfect, I will continue to cook with them. Crust dough was inspired by this Smitten Kitchen dough, but I used sour cream instead of ricotta since that’s what I had in the fridge. Topped with my King Arthur Sparkling Sugar.
Banana Bread
We had veryyyy ripe bananas. So alas, banana bread. Used my favorite recipe from King Arthur which calls for the addition of apricot jam in addition to honey. Perfect blend of tart and sweetness and the the absolute jam (pun intended).
In kitchen adjacent news, Mark and I recently updated all of our spices - we are now a Morton & Bassett family. After a few flavorless, dull, and questionably cheap spices from Whole Foods we decided to invest in a higher quality, more consistent product. These spices are all so much more pungent, and aromatic. I am very pleased with this upgrade - but the one downside to this life change was that the jars were slightly larger than the Whole Foods spice jars and no longer evenly fit in our spice drawer. So I am (too) thrilled to share we also invested in new (air tight) jars with custom labels.
