July 6th 2025
Menu
Inspired by absolutely delicious Italian food Mark and I ate in SF last week, we went full Italian American and served up traditional “Sunday Gravy” which is a fun way to say “red sauce with all the meat products you can buy”. Also because all Italian food has garlic - aka forbidden Panda fruit - Mark made her, her own non-garlic dish 🥹
Italian Gravy
No recipe here just hours watching Italian people make some variation of this on YouTube. The steps were roughly:
Sear the meat in olive oil - in our case that meant sausage and pork chops
Remove the meat and brown garlic to flavor the oil
Remove the garlic, and sweat some onions
Then come the tomatoes: an entire can of tomato paste & four 28oz cans of whole peeled tomatoes
Bring to a simmer, add all the seared meat back in and braise on low for as many hours as you can (we did somewhere around 4)
I should also mention that in addition to all the aforementioned meat, about an hour before we served, we also made some HUGE meatballs (recipe from Mark’s grandma Lucille). We shallow fried them in olive oil, them finished them off in the “gravy”. Then we served the whole thing with big rigatoni, fresh basil and some freshly grated parmesan on one platter for dramatics 💃🏻
“House” Salad
This isn’t our house salad, so much as our attempt to replicate Sodini’s house salad. We made ATK’s creamy Italian dressing - which has you microwave the parmesan and herbs to melt and bloom them respectively - sounds insane, but it was so delicious 😋 Served with romaine, garbanzo beans, kidney beans, black olives and freshly sliced baby bella mushrooms.
Bruschetta
So technically this was our lunch and we did not serve it for dinner but Mark was very excited for Liz to see this, so here we are! He toasted some sourdough, drizzled with olive oil in the oven for ~15 minutes. Topped the bread with fresh chopped tomato, basil, and the roasted garlic from the gravy. Drizzled it all with balsamic glaze and move olive oil. Belissima 👌🏻
Strawberry Parfait
The strawberries continue to be oh so very in season, so I made a simple strawberry parfait. It was almost identical to what Peach and Jake made last week - except instead of sweetened condensed milk I used ricotta I had left over. This version was not as a good as the ricotta was a bit grainy? But alas, cream + strawberries can never really be that bad.
Strawberry Lemon Almond Pound Cake
This is the same recipe from a few weeks ago but instead of blueberries, I used strawberries 🍓
Dog Food
Mark cooked off the extra ground beef and pork we had from the meatballs, added some frozen rice, peas and carrots and served it to both Panda and Scooter. It was a huge hit 🐶
As an added bonus this week for you and our waist lines, check out the absolute feast we all consumed a mere 72 hours ago for July 4th over here! 🇺🇸 🍔