Weekend Gathering No. 2
July 4–6, 2026 The Backyard Table
The Jersey Nonna
Weekend Gathering No. 2
July 4–6, 2026
The Backyard Table
Two hundred and fifty years old today, America. We’re celebrating the way we always have — outside, with people we love, waiting for the sky to do something extraordinary.
🌿 This Week at the Farm Stand
Summer has stopped being polite about it.
The strawberries are finishing their run — grab them this week if you want the last of them, because they mean it when they go. The blueberries are fully here now, confident and sweet. And the corn. The first real Jersey corn of the season is arriving at farm stands this week, and if you haven’t had it yet, this is your weekend.
The tomatoes are coming. You can feel it. A few stands have them already — deeply red, heavy, irregular, the kind that smell like a garden when you hold them. Buy them if you see them. Don’t refrigerate them. Leave them on the counter and use them within two days.
This is the weekend summer stops hinting and starts delivering.
Into My Basket This Week
First Jersey corn · Blueberries · Last of the strawberries · Jersey beefsteak tomatoes (grab them if you find them) · Cucumbers · Fresh basil · Flat-leaf parsley · Red onion · A small bunch of zinnias or sunflowers — because it’s a holiday and the table deserves it
🍽️ This Weekend’s Menu
Friday Evening — Welcome to the Weekend
Caprese salad with capers and balsamic reduction
Grilled Italian sausage · Corn on the cob
Good bread · Cold beer or lemonade
Saturday — The Fourth
Morning
Blueberry pancakes on the back porch
Coffee before the day gets loud
Afternoon — The Backyard Table
The Jersey Nonna Caprese Salad (tomatoes at room temperature, always)
MNiece’s Cucumber Tomato Feta Salad (dressed with fresh lemon juice — her idea, and she was right)
Babs’ Potato Salad — the recipe that belongs to someone, and always will · Full story on Substack
Grilled burgers on toasted buns — raw red onion, sliced tomato, lettuce
Fresh corn · Watermelon
Dessert
Fourth of July Berries — The Jersey Nonna Way (recipe below)
Ina Garten’s Flag Sheet Cake — because it’s America’s 250th birthday and some occasions demand the real thing
Sunday Morning
Garden herb frittata · Toast · Fresh blueberries · Good coffee
Sunday Supper
Leftover magic — potato salad tastes better the second day
Cold sliced tomatoes with good olive oil and salt
Whatever’s left of the flag cake
🍓 Featured Recipe
Fourth of July Berries — The Jersey Nonna Way
Red, white, and blue never tasted so Italian. Serves 4 generously.
This dessert came together the way the best ones do — not from a cookbook, but from thinking about what summer actually tastes like and letting the season lead.
Fresh Jersey strawberries and blueberries, coaxed into a deep crimson syrup, poured over more fresh berries, finished with a cloud of chilled zabaglione and two pignoli cookies balanced on the rim.
It is festive without trying. It is Italian without announcing it. And it is the kind of thing people ask you about for years.
For the Berry Coulis
1 cup fresh strawberries, hulled and halved
1 cup fresh blueberries
3 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp water
Combine berries, sugar, and water in a small saucepan over medium heat. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the berries burst and release their juices — about 8 to 10 minutes. The mixture will look loose and jammy. Remove from heat.
Press through a fine mesh strainer or a double layer of cheesecloth, pressing firmly to extract every drop of juice. Discard the solids. Return the liquid to the saucepan and simmer over medium-low heat until reduced by about a third and lightly syrupy — another 5 to 8 minutes. It should coat a spoon but still pour easily.
Cool completely or bring to room temperature. The syrup keeps refrigerated for three days.
For the Zabaglione (make this first — it needs time to chill)
4 egg yolks
¼ cup sugar
½ cup dry Marsala wine
Combine egg yolks, sugar, and Marsala in a heatproof bowl set over a pot of barely simmering water — the bowl should not touch the water. Whisk continuously and vigorously until the mixture triples in volume, turns pale yellow, and holds a ribbon when you lift the whisk. This takes 8 to 10 minutes and your arm will know about it.
Remove from heat. Set the bowl over a larger bowl of ice water and continue whisking until cool. Refrigerate until fully chilled, at least one hour. The zabaglione will be silky, airy, and just barely sweet.
For the Pignoli Cookies (makes about 18)
One 8 oz tube almond paste (not marzipan — they are not the same)
½ cup powdered sugar
1 egg white
1 cup pine nuts
Break the almond paste into a bowl and work in the powdered sugar with your hands until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Add the egg white and mix until a soft, slightly sticky dough forms.
Roll into small balls, about 1 inch across. Pour pine nuts into a shallow bowl. Press each ball gently into the pine nuts, rolling to coat on all sides. Place on a parchment-lined baking sheet, pressing very slightly to flatten.
Bake at 325°F for 14 to 16 minutes until golden at the edges and just set. They will still feel soft — they firm as they cool. Cool completely on the pan before moving them.
Nonna Note: Almond paste and marzipan are not interchangeable. Marzipan is sweeter and smoother and will make your cookies taste like candy. Almond paste has more almond, less sugar, and gives you the dense chewy interior that makes a pignoli cookie worth making. Find it in the baking aisle, usually near the canned fruit.
To Assemble
In a parfait glass or a pretty ice cream dish, arrange a generous handful of fresh mixed strawberries and blueberries. Spoon the berry coulis over and around — be generous, let it pool at the bottom. Add a cloud of chilled zabaglione on top.
Balance two pignoli cookies on the rim.
Serve immediately.
One more thing: This dessert is built to be made in parts. The coulis can be made two days ahead. The zabaglione the morning of. The cookies the day before. When your guests arrive, assembly takes three minutes and looks like you spent the afternoon in the kitchen. You did not have to. This is the Jersey Nonna way.
📝 From Nonna’s Notebook
The Hill at Colgate Field
When I was growing up, the Fourth of July had a shape to it.
Every year, my immediate family together with my aunts, uncles, and cousins would walk the half mile to Colgate Field together. We’d stake out our blankets on the hill early, claiming territory the way children do, with great seriousness and very little strategy.
Then we’d wait for the sky to do something extraordinary.
And it always did.
I remember the fountain of sparkles cascading down. The spinning wheels of light on the ground. The way we’d lie back on those blankets and ooooh and ahhhhh at everything, laughing at ourselves for being so delighted and completely unable to help it.
And the booms.
Not just the noise of them — the physical fact of them. The fireworks that didn’t just make sound but moved through your chest, a pressure against your ribs that arrived before the sound did and said pay attention, something real is happening here. We’d laugh at each explosion, startled every time even though we knew it was coming. And the finale — everything at once, the whole sky full, the booming overlapping and building until it felt like the air itself had opinions about the Fourth of July. We stopped talking. We just felt it.
Afterward, the whole loud happy crowd of us would walk to my aunt’s house and pile into her kitchen — the children at the table with cold milk and her homemade chocolate chip cookies and brownies, the grownups drifting outside to do whatever grownups did. We never asked. We had cookies.
We thought we were living inside something ordinary.
I drove past Colgate Field not long ago.
That hill we so carefully camped on — the mountain we staked our blankets on with such ceremony, the great elevation from which we watched the sky perform?
A small rise. Barely a slope.
My child’s eyes had turned a gentle hill into a mountain, and I had been carrying that mountain inside me for fifty years without knowing it.
I think that’s what summers do when they’re good enough. They make everything larger. The fireworks louder. The cookies sweeter. The hill higher.
And they’re right to.
🌼 Around the House
A holiday table doesn’t need bunting and banners to feel like a celebration.
This year I’m keeping it simple — a white tablecloth, whatever red and white flowers the farm stand has, and my grandmother’s blue transferware pitcher in the center because it happens to be exactly the right color and because she would have liked being part of the party.
Simple is actually harder than it looks. And more beautiful when you get it right.
One other thing: if you’re eating outside this weekend, set the table before you do anything else. A set table tells everyone who sits down at it that this moment was prepared for. That someone thought about them before they arrived. Five minutes. Worth every one.
🧺 Weekend Kitchen Planner
Thursday Evening (the work that makes Saturday easy)
☐ Make Babs’ Potato Salad — the whole batch
☐ It goes in the refrigerator tonight. This is not a suggestion.
☐ Bake the pignoli cookies — they keep beautifully overnight in a tin
Friday
☐ Farm stand — corn, tomatoes, blueberries, last strawberries, flowers
☐ Make the balsamic reduction for the caprese — 10 minutes, keeps all weekend
☐ Make the berry coulis and refrigerate
☐ Bake the flag cake in the morning before the heat arrives
☐ Set the outdoor table before you do anything else
Saturday — The Fourth
☐ Make the zabaglione in the morning — refrigerate until needed
☐ Assemble the caprese just before serving — tomatoes at room temperature, always
☐ Dress my niece’s cucumber tomato feta salad with fresh lemon juice right before the meal
☐ Pull potato salad from the refrigerator 20 minutes before serving
☐ Grill the burgers last — everything else should already be on the table
☐ Assemble the berry dessert just before serving — three minutes, stunning results
Sunday
☐ Cold leftover potato salad for lunch — it is better today than it was yesterday
☐ Save a slice of flag cake for someone who missed Saturday
☐ Sit outside for ten quiet minutes before the weekend ends
This week’s standing invitation: find someone who didn’t have a place to go this weekend and give them one. There is always room for one more chair.
🌟 Worth Keeping This Week
“Summers that are good enough make everything larger — the fireworks louder, the cookies sweeter, the hill higher. They’re right to.”
— The Jersey Nonna
❤️ Before You Go...
My niece taught me a salad this summer.
Cucumbers. Tomatoes. Feta cheese. Fresh lemon juice. That’s it.
I would not have thought to use lemon instead of vinegar. I would have reached for what I knew. But my niece didn’t know what I knew, so she did what made sense to her, and it was better.
I think about that sometimes. How much we miss because we’re too certain about the way things are supposed to be done. How a younger hand in the kitchen isn’t a disruption — it’s a reminder that there are other ways to be right.
My aunt taught me to be generous at the table and never count how many cookies someone took. I carried that into my own kitchen and tried to pass it along. My niece showed up this summer with a salad dressed in lemon juice and reminded me that the learning goes both ways.
Every generation brings something to the table.
Quite literally, it turns out.
Happy Fourth of July. Happy 250th, America. Go feel some fireworks in your chest tonight.
Until next Friday,
— Kathy
The Jersey Nonna