For cooks there is no doubt about it; the best thing about the fall is the abundant harvest. And with that coincides perhaps the second best thing about the fall; it’s new cookbook season. And with that in mind, today we look at Lidia Matticchio Bastianich’s new offering, Lidia’s Celebrate Like An Italian, a cookbook brimming with over two hundred new “foolproof” recipes that will make your kitchen your favourite room in the house.
Lidia Matticchio Bastianich needs no introduction to fans of Italian cooking; she has won an Emmy as host of Public Television’s Lidia’s Kitchen and has authored thirteen cookbooks. She is also a judge on Italy’s highest rated daily program, La Prova del Cuoco, she owns several restaurants and is a partner in the highly acclaimed Eataly, the largest Italian food marketplace in the world. And in this latest work, she brings that know how to our own kitchens.
Certainly the weather recently has incited a return to cooking indoors, and it is a joy to have a whole new set of recipes to add to our culinary canon, complete with updated classics divided into nine chapters; aperitivi, appetizers, salads, soups, vegetables and sides, polenta, risotto and pasta, fish and seafood, poultry and meat and of course, to finish, a chapter on desserts. In all, two hundred and twenty recipes that will take the chill out of fall and bring the warmth back to your hearth.
Co-authored with her daughter Tanya, the sixth such collaboration, this mother-daughter combo also includes suggestions on how to host the perfect barbecue so you can hit the ground running next summer, as well as tutorials on making pizza for large groups, wine pairing and how to set a perfect table for your family and guests. If this book doesn’t teach you how to celebrate like an Italian, nothing will!
