Week Four: Italian-American Classics — 22% Italian on Paper, 100% at the Table.

The Sauce — Make This First

• Lorianne’s Almond Pesto — sweet basil, Marcona almonds, Parmesan and Pecorino, no pine nuts. Ten minutes in the processor; it threads through three of this week’s plates.

The Week’s Dinners

• Pesto Chicken Insalata Caprese — pounded chicken, ciliegine, cherry tomatoes, pan juices, and a squeeze of lemon. The week’s anchor dish.
• Pesto Shrimp & Spinach Pasta — court-bouillon poached shrimp, linguine, wilted spinach-arugula. Rich enough that we probably should have served penance.
• 5-Ingredient Chicken Piccata — lemon, butter, capers. Weeknight fast, date-night good.
• Roasted Branzino + Tarragon Beurre Blanc — herb-stuffed whole fish, our Fish Friday. Feeding more than two? Tilapia and a simple lemon butter is a fair swap.
• Hearty Beef Stew + Root Vegetables — Colin’s slow braise with red wine, San Marzanos, and mushrooms. Crusty bread, not lemon.

The Desserts

• Panna Cotta with Balsamic Glazed Strawberries — silky, orange-scented, and happiest made a day ahead.
• Lemon Posset — three ingredients, no gelatin, no eggs. Peak lemon, promised last issue and delivered.
• Dark Chocolate Bark + Sea Salt & Almonds — ten minutes of active work; disappears considerably faster.

The Bonus — Free This Week

• Bruschetta Caprese — garlic-rubbed grilled bread, fresh mozzarella, and tomato season doing the heavy lifting. No code needed — this one’s on the house.

Somewhere in the Campania region of Southern Italy, in 1882, my maternal great-grandfather, Antonio Razzano, was born. This much is certain — I have the documentation in my Ancestry files, helped along by Catholic parish records and the fact that his family stayed under one roof after they crossed over to Geddes, New York, in the early 1920s, just ahead of the door closing on Southern European immigration in 1924. A generation later, my maternal grandfather, Alphonse, Americanized the family name to Razzone.

I never really knew that side of the family. What I have are secondhand fragments: the sparse visits my father made to Alphonse’s house, visits I’m too young to remember myself, and the recipes he carried home from them. My father, mostly non-Italian European by blood, has always been the type to fall for a good garden and a better recipe — Alphonse’s kitchen won him over completely. The one dish that survived intact is a frittata: egg, zucchini, mozzarella, mushroom, about as classic an Italian home-cook dish as they come. So this week’s menu speaks to me less as memory and more as inheritance — paperwork, DNA, and one very good frittata standing in for a childhood I didn’t get to have.

In fact, 6 of the 26 weeks in Sunday Forward’s recipe plan are Italian menus. Last week’s newsletter gushed about lemons, but frankly, I could eat them year-round. It’s a craving, like a bad drug, but the opposite — it makes me want to stroll through lemon groves in the late evening along the Amalfi coastline, past the same Sfusato Amalfitano trees that have scented that stretch of coast for centuries. I don’t know how much of this is my genetic heritage talking (only 22% Italian, according to Ancestry, which frankly bummed me out) and how much is just that Italian technique has quietly seeped into so much of what we call Western cooking. Either way, I am down for it.

Ask any American what their favorite Italian meal is, and the answer would most likely be any of the standard Olive Garden offerings. (Although I noticed they’re refining the menu with Calabrian specials this summer.) An everyday American on a $300-or-less budget per week — I’d venture to guess — would say spaghetti, lasagna, or pizza. So, dammit, we left those off the list. You’ve already got a recipe that you use every time for those three. We went with pesto first. Mostly because it’s basil time, baby. And peak lemon time. And by God, tomatoes. It’s tomato season. So the menu reflects some of the more off-the-beaten-path Italian meals — the ones my ancestors, and maybe even the Etruscans who ruled nearby Capua more than two thousand years before Antonio was born, were more likely to have actually eaten. (I can’t prove the Etruscan part. I can prove the DNA part, so there.)

I know y’all may already be fickle about how you cook your spaghetti sauce, but there are standards in Italy for what makes a true Bolognese — Italy’s Academy of Cuisine literally deposited an official recipe with Bologna’s Chamber of Commerce back in 1982, so this isn’t just me being precious about it. With pesto, you’re afforded a bit more leeway. We have to make a dietary accommodation because Colin is allergic to pine nuts, so almonds — Marcona almonds — are our stand-in. You’ll see when you taste my pesto why it’s a perfect fit instead of pine nuts. Speaking of accommodations, we want to remind our gentle readers that we are always pro-you-do-you. If you feel pesto must be made with pine nuts, or that’s your tradition, then stick with it. More and more these days, we’re becoming one big melting pot of culinary ideas, and how you choose to do things isn’t something we’re here to judge. That’s why we won’t judge you for buying off-the-shelf pesto, as we’ve indicated with the other sauces, but we can promise that the flavor and texture of from-scratch, and the extra prep time it takes, will always pay off.

While the kids were gone, we got braver in the kitchen and went a little deep-pocketed for a few of the meals. The fish and the shrimp meals were both a bit pricier, and there was wine. (Reminder: I don’t drink, but I definitely know the benefit of using authentic spirits in our meals. It pays off in dividends.) If you’re feeding four or six, adjust: swap in tilapia for the branzino, and a simple lemon butter for the beurre blanc. This round, we only had two people to feed, so we took the opportunity to make some Michelin-worthy transgressions.

In fact, our Friday night pescatarian meal was a change-up from what we’d originally planned in the menu. A “creamy avocado and pesto linguine” didn’t appeal to me as a Friday vegetarian meal, but what we landed on with the shrimp definitely hit the mark — except that we probably should have served penance, because it was a rather rich meal. As in: we could not eat one more bite. Shrimp seems light, you’d think, but a dozen-plus of them, plus pasta, plus a heavyweight pesto, is enough to fuel a marathon or hibernate for winter on. The fish was a spur-of-the-moment thing. Squeeze your lemon on everything — except that beef stew. Just serve up your crusty bread, rustic-style, and let it sop up all the rich stock. Enjoy your time in the kitchen this week! Ciao!

The spur-of-the-moment fish itself — our Michelin-worthy transgression, in full: