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Image via Captured TracksMeredith Graves is magic. The writer, musician, former host of MTV News, and current Director of Music at Kickstarter, known for shredding stage as the blazing front person of Perfect Pussy, has a side gig: witch spectacular and boss manifest-er. When COVID silenced the global live music scene, devastating its community and economy, Graves co-spearheaded the Lights On campaign to keep beloved nightlife staples like Greenpoint’s St. Vitus from falling on hard times.

Welcome to Buona Domenica, a weekly newsletter of inspired Italian home cooking and baking. I’m a journalist, cooking instructor, occasional tour guide, and author of eight cookbooks on Italian cuisine. Click here to browse through the newsletter archive. If you’re looking for a particular recipe, you’ll find all Buona Domenica recipes—143 and counting—indexed here, ready to download or print—a function for paid subscribers. This week’s newsletter features an extensively tested recipe for Pizza Bianca, plus a variation for Pizza Rossa.

Sometimes, decades later, you realize that something that seemed mundane at the time is, in retrospect, really odd.  For example, when I was growing up in Northern California in the 1970s, there were three regional pizza chains built around a Dixieland Jazz theme: Straw Hat, Shakey's and the Gay Nineties. (Yes, the Gay Nineties.) Literally, these were places where you could sit down, order a mediocre pizza and a pitcher of beer and be entertained by a banjo-player dressed in a striped shirt and straw boater.

It all started with a jar of artichokes. Steve said, “I noticed you froze some pizza dough. Maybe we could fire up the Ooni and make some pizza with the artichokes.”  Sounds simple enough. A few years ago, my friend Bryan Ford came to my house and we had a little pizza party. At the end, he said I could keep the oven (which was already well-used) because he had a brand new one at home.

I recently got to talk to Emily Christensen for a piece she wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer about the intersection of diet culture and salads: “Once a ‘meal of deprivation,’ these cooks are reclaiming salad from diet culture’s clutches.” She begins this piece: “Like a lot of fat people, I have a complicated relationship with salad.” Talking with Emily for this piece, I got to reflect on growing up with sad bags of mesclun mix with straight balsamic vinegar to eventually loving salads with tons of fat and flavor.

Thanks for checking out Nuclear Meltdown. If you enjoy this newsletter, consider subscribing. It’s free. In my last post on building a house that could last 1,000 years, I mentioned that a long-term mindset is a core idea of this newsletter. But I wanted to dive into that idea more because it’s been an underlying assumption of Nuclear Meltdown from the beginning. It’s what I was talking about when I wrote about it taking multiple life times to build a village of supportive people (“it takes a village…”).

We’re doing things a little differently this Friday, friends. Instead of information gleaned from a stack of press releases (and the stack is growing and growing and …), you’re receiving a recipe. Recipes are good to have around, especially this time of year when a garden or the pots lining your deck are full of harvestable produce. Like mine are. As you can see, my lettuce needs harvesting so the other items in this small spot can finally get some space to grow.

As some of you know, there’s presently a debate raging about the fact that Substack will not automatically ban Nazis who pop up on this platform. That’s because Substack’s content guidelines are written in an intentionally liberal way, to allow most speech. One of the only red lines is direct, credible incitement of violence — racism alone, including of the Nazi variety, doesn’t qualify. (See disclosure about my own connections to Substack in the footnote.

photo credit: Inter Miami CFInter Miami continued its 2024 season with a Derby Day match-up against cross-state rivals Orlando City. With the game starting at 4:30 PM, you could probably imagine how humid the weather was. The temperature also most certainly reflected the heated conditions on the pitch as well. Tata Martino rolled out Miami in his typical 4-3-3, nothing out of the usual. But, what subsequently happened after kick-off is everything La Familia could’ve dreamed of.