APÉRITIF:
Somehow, despite having a whole 12 months of lockdown behind us, some of you still haven’t seen The Sopranos. Folks, if you haven’t given this absolute masterpiece of a show multiple months worth of your attention, what have you been doing all year? We’re begging you to stop watching whatever show you’re currently wasting your time with (did you know they’re going to make eight seasons of Bridgerton?!), and start getting acquainted with Christopher and Adriana’s tumultuous love story, the monster that is Ralphie Cifaretto, and most importantly, A.J. Soprano, a living legend. One of the first editions of Sifted includes a guide to our favorite Italian-American recipes, designed for everyone who knows that Carmela’s lasagna has a layer of basil leaves right underneath the cheese. Today, we're giving those of you who have no idea what that means their own batch of recipes, ones we hope will leave you stuffed with tomatoes, mozzarella, gabagool, olives and oregano, but craving more Italian things to consume (to which we say: have you considered The Sopranos?). You can also find this week’s Dinner Plans from Jessica Kane, an expert in content, cats, and of course, cooking. She has a sweet tooth as insatiable and cavity-ridden as ours, but pulled together a menu of sweet, savory, and alcoholic(!) recipes for our dear Sifters. Mangia!
ON THE MENU THIS WEEK:
JESSICA KANE’S DINNER PLANS
Blood Orange, Tangerine & Rosemary Margarita: I've never been a big drinker, but something about being locked in my house for months at a time eventually made me begin to experiment with cocktails (wild, right?!). My greatest success so far has been this marg that somehow manages to be herbaceous, tart, on the sweeter side, and incredibly refreshing all at once. Highly recommend whipping one up the moment it starts to feel like spring so you can pretend you're sipping it on a tropical vacation.
Crispy Salt & Vinegar Smashed Potatoes: Do you ever see a rating for a beloved recipe that falls below a 5/5 and get extremely defensive? That's how I feel about this recipe’s 4.3/5, which is an inaccurate description of a nearly flawless potato. They're—dare I say it—better than French fries (*gasp*). I don't bother with the yogurt sauce because the taters are so delicious on their own, and they heat up well in a cast iron the following day...if you manage to leave extras, which doesn't happen frequently in our house.
Party Steak with Grilled Scallion Salsa Verde: I try to limit my red meat intake (it's usually reserved for multiple In-N-Out runs a month), but when my partner learned about this recipe from a quarantine cooking GroupMe he hosts with all his friends, I made an exception. The kick from the chilies, the acidity from the vinegar, and the char on the meat creates such a flavor explosion, and as the name notes, it would eventually make such an impressive main course at a dinner party that I can almost taste the future social stimulation with each delicious bite.
Puppy Chow: Blame the Midwest mom in me (I am neither from the Midwest nor a mom, I digress), but I think this dessert recipe reigns supreme, mainly because the level of impact well exceeds the level of effort. It takes approximately seven minutes to throw together, makes the ideal snack for my hours-long "Succession" binges, and provides that pick-me-up I need during the daily mid-afternoon WFH slump. Plus, you’ll have me at peanut butter + chocolate anything.
SO YOU’RE FINALLY, ACTUALLY WATCHING THE SOPRANOS
Italian Salad: Growing up in Jersey, our go-to Italian place, La Riviera, was the stuff of legend. White tablecloths, ice water served in crystal goblets, giant portions of chicken parm accompanied by equally giant ‘sides’ of pasta, all drenched in glorious marinara. When you think Italian, you think gabagool, you think red sauce, you think fuckin’ ziti! But my favorite part of dinner at La Riviera arrived well before the mains. Their “primavera salad”, was an impeccable rendition of the Italian salad, complete with not one but two kinds of cheese (mozz and provolone), bitter greens, and lots of oregano. My favorite modern-day renditions of the Italian salad from my youth are Nancy Silverton’s Chopped Salad and Alison Roman’s Iceberg Salad. Nancy’s is a mostly-faithful rendition, but all chopped up and tangled with barely-distinguishable slivers of radicchio, salami, and pepperoncini poking out. Alison’s skews less New Jersey-red-sauce, more Olive Garden-by-way-of-Brooklyn, with marinated onion and briny olives, big chunks of crunchy iceberg (or romaine), and a generous shower of pecorino. Both are completely delicious, brimming with copious amounts of the requisite dried oregano, and almost guaranteed to steal the spotlight from the rest of the meal.
Scelzo Stromboli: Aside from her unconditional love for seemingly every person she’s ever crossed paths with, my grandma's stromboli is the greatest thing about her. In case you aren’t familiar, stromboli is a thin, eggy bread swirled around layers of meat and cheese. Sometimes there’s sauce inside and sometimes it’s meatless, but my grandma’s stromboli is always a salty, creamy combo of salami, prosciutto, ham, and provolone cheese. It’s best served hot and whole, with a side of warm red sauce or cold mustard for dipping thin slices into. This recipe is the closest I’ve found online to the stretchy, doughy one that lives in her head, but feel free to buy pizza dough from your local shop—my grandma gets hers from the Italian deli she’s a regular at, a place that is full of people she loves as much as her own bloodline.
Sunday Sauce: As far as my half-actually-Italian, half-mom-who-thinks-she’s-Carmela-Soprano self is concerned, Sunday sauce should be mostly meat, and I can confirm the three pounds of short ribs this recipe calls for will leave you with a pot of sauce that is sufficiently meaty. It bubbles all (Sun)day long into a rich and savory sauce that’s ideal for tossing with rigatoni as the main event of your dinner, but also for keeping a bowl of on the table to dip seedy slices of semolina bread into. I find the luscious, buttery sauce nearly impossible to stop eating, but that might just be the thinks-she’s-Meadow-Soprano in me.
Tiramisu: The thing about the internet is that sometimes you just start seeing a dish everywhere: feta pasta, olive oil cakes, doughnuts. Maybe they started in restaurants, maybe they started on TikTok, but suddenly they’re everywhere. For the last few months, I’ve felt like I couldn’t stop seeing tiramisu. On Instagram, in newsletters, it seemed everyone was making it and this 70s icon was finally poised for a comeback. If I saw Dr. Melfi she would probably ask if tiramisu actually is everywhere, or is it just that I want to see tiramisu everywhere? Either way, I had to make it myself. I took our friends at Digestivo’s recommendation and followed Marc Vetri’s recipe, which uses the traditional whipped egg whites instead of the more common whipped cream folded into the mascarpone (trying to provide my lactose-intolerant GI system just a hair of relief). Marc’s recipe calls for a pure coffee soak but I wanted to be extra, so I took inspiration from Carolina Gelen’s recipe’s soak, incorporating Grand Marnier and a little dash of vanilla for drama. I also zested some orange into my inner layer to play off the orange liqueur, which gave the final result a “Terry’s Chocolate Orange vibe”, according to my friend. Tangy, creamy, luscious and light, and guaranteed to destroy my body in a way only crossing the DiMeo family could.
BBOTW (BEST BITES OF THE WEEK):
Court: Some bites just stick with you. They stop you in your tracks and smack you in the face and give you the kind of feeling that you’ll be thinking about that bite for a while. One such bite for me was the fish taco at Oscar’s in Pacific Beach, California, about 8 years ago, in the closest thing to a religious experience I may have ever had. This week, I ate them again. While some circumstances got in the way of having the full Proustian/Anton Ego moment (COVID, namely) they were as good as I remember, especially the aptly named “Especial” taco. A mix of grilled shrimp and scallops and their extra special smoked fish—which tastes pastrami-adjacent—is served up like all their tacos: in tender corn tortillas with lots of tomato, onion, cilantro and fat, spoon-scooped slices of avocado. They’re best topped with an artful splatter of one of their two signature sauces: fiery jalapeño crema or creamy, smoky chipotle sauce.
Gab: We’ve professed our love for Yellow Rose before, and so has everyone else, but it still feels necessary to share that their potato and egg breakfast taco saved my life after a particularly heavy night of drinking. As a person who notoriously hates flour tortillas, it really means something when I say I could house a stack of these flaky, fatty, flour tortillas in one sitting. They're springy and stretchy and actually taste like something, "something" being nutty grains and silky fat and hot, smoky char. The genius chefs at Yellow Rose stuff this already-perfect food with creamy, heavily peppered scrambled eggs and soft, seasoned potato chunks, and the diner-like quality of it all (albeit generally spicier and smokier) soaked up all the alcohol in my body and quickly brought me back to life.
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