Editorial Reviews

Book Description:
In her hit Food Network show Everyday Italian, Giada De Laurentiis shows you how to cook delicious, beautiful food in a flash. And here, in her long-awaited first book, she does the same—helps you put a fabulous dinner on the table tonight, for friends or just for the kids, with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of flavor. She makes it all look easy, because it is.

Everyday Italian is true to its title: the fresh, simple recipes are incredibly quick and accessible, and also utterly mouth-watering—perfect for everyday cooking. And the book is focused on the real-life considerations of what you actually have in your refrigerator and pantry (no mail-order ingredients here) and what you’re in the mood for—whether a simply sauced pasta or a hearty family-friendly roast, these great recipes cover every contingency. So, for example, you’ll find dishes that you can make solely from pantry ingredients, or those that transform lowly leftovers into exquisite entrées (including brilliant ideas for leftover pasta), and those that satisfy your yearning to have something sweet baking in the oven. There are 7 ways to make red sauce more interesting, 6 different preparations of the classic cutlet, 5 perfect pestos, 4 creative uses for prosciutto, 3 variations on basic polenta, 2 great steaks, and 1 sublime chocolate tiramisù—plus 100 other recipes that turn everyday ingredients into speedy but special dinners.

What’s more, Everyday Italian is organized according to what type of food you want tonight—whether a soul-warming stew for Sunday supper, a quick sauté for a weeknight, or a baked pasta for potluck. These categories will help you figure out what to cook in an instant, with such choices as fresh-from-the-pantry appetizers, sauceless pastas, everyday roasts, and stuffed vegetables—whatever you’re in the mood for, you’ll be able to find a simple, delicious recipe for it here. That’s the beauty of Italian home cooking, and that’s what Giada De Laurentiis offers here—the essential recipes to make a great Italian dinner. Tonight.

Customer Reviews

love it by Tannisha Joseph-skeet
well i bought this book for a friend for christmas she is a newly wed and she love giada she absolutly it

I love Giada!!! by Sidney’s mom
Another great cookbook from my favorite Cooking Network star. Her recipes are elegant, easy, healthy–and delicious. You just can’t go wrong with Giada De Laurentis!

Excellent chicken piccata, disappointed on the lasagne by Melissa Kaye
I’ve had a mixed experience with this cookbook. So far I’ve made 2 recipes: Classic Italian Lasagne and Chicken Piccata, one turned out well and the other wasn’t impressive.

My mom and I decided to stray from our usual lasagne recipe and try the one in this book. As we started making the sauces from scratch and preparing the fillings we realized that the recipe was a bit more work than we anticipated. I had expected “Everyday Italian” to refer to meals that could be prepared on a weeknight with a reasonable amount of work, but this was more effort than I would do on a “regular night”. Once we made it, I wasn’t all that impressed with the flavor, either. Since it calls for bechamel sauce (which we had to make from scratch, by the way), it was too rich for me. I think everyone has their own idea of what lasagne should taste like and maybe this just wasn’t mine. I probably won’t be making that one again.

Giada did redeem herself with the Chicken Piccata recipe, though. It was easy enough to prepare that I was surprised at how delicious it turned out! Very elegant and yet very simple. It is definitely a candidate for serving to guests.

One thing that did bother me a bit was the recipe for prosciutto-wrapped breadsticks - it calls for refrigerated breadstick dough (like Pillsbury!) Somehow I just didn’t think that fit into a cookbook that has recipes for a zillion “made-from-scratch” pasta sauces.

Overall, I’ll be keeping this cookbook for the chicken piccata recipe and I may try some of the other similar recipes. I’m not expecting to love every recipe in the book, though.

One of Giada’s cookbooks–a few brief comments. by Lin
If you want to expand your cookbook library and must add one of Giada’s cookbooks to your shelf, then (in my opinion) you may want to look into Giada’s other cookbook called “Giada’s Family Dinners”. The reason I say this is because I think that the recipes in Giada’s other book (FAMILY DINNERS) has tastier recipes.

In this cookbook,instead, Giada tries to add to her basic repertoire, but most of the recipes included (in this book in review) seem boring to me. Either that, or even bizarre,— such as her cranberry raviolis (which sound pretty awful).

As previous commentators stated, I got tired of looking at more and more photos of Giada, and less and less photos of the recipes’ steps. I would have preferred if Giada had included photos of “how to” steps, or even photos of the recipes’ layout , such as the step-by-step photos shown in THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FOOD, (by another author,not Giada).

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