Italian American Forever: Classic Recipes for Everything You Want to Eat: A Cookbook

LOVE Alex! I cook some version of an Italian meal every week at home and it’s so refreshing to find an uncomplicated cookbook with TONS of recipes I actually want to cook. So many cookbooks only have a couple of recipes I want to try, but this one has so many that I will be busy in the kitchen for quite some time. Familiar favorites, beautiful photographs.

First of, I love Alex and her cooking. I found the book to be full of comfort foods. I'd buy this again!

I enjoy cooking it brings out my creativity. I love trying and experimenting with new recipes and techniques.

WE ARE AN ITALIAN FAMILY AND REALLY APPRECIATE THE WAY HER BOOK IS WRITTEN.MANY RECIPES WILL BE ENOYED.

Great book! Being Italian American myself, this book brings me lots of wonderful memories .

Perfect dinner recipes for all occasions.

Love Alex’s recipes and this book is no exception! Gorgeous pictures-I’m hungry already!

I have a nice collection of Italian cookbooks and thought one that focused on Italian American food would be a good addition. When I buy a new cookbook I always like to cook a dinner where I try a few new recipes as written to see how I like it. Perhaps I just picked the wrong recipes to try but I was very disappointed in the resulting dishes, in general, and in the editing/recipe testing. I love to bake focaccia and have several go to recipes. But I am always willing to try something new, especially when it is a bit different. “Ava’s Focaccia”, page 225, is touted in the description as one of her best recipes, but the description of how it is made in the intro is not the same as the recipe. First you mix your dough without kneading it and then stick it in the refrigerator for 2 days. The fact that it only uses 1/2 tsp of yeast seemed odd to me but I thought perhaps the yeast would multiply during the long cold rise or the later 5 hour proofing in the oven. That did not appear to happen in my case. After sitting in the refrigerator for 2 days you are then instructed to press the dough into the pan and let it proof in the oven at 150 degrees for 5 hours. There was no mention of covering the dough during the proofing step but I have seen focaccia recipes that say the dough doesn’t need to be covered during proofing because of the large quantity of oil. After 5 hours the dough had barely risen and a crunchy crust had formed on the surface. After baking it at 450 F as described it was too crunchy and flat. When I went back and looked at the intro I noticed that it talks about Ava first making the dough and then letting it proof in the oven overnight and then putting it in the refrigerator until ready to use. This is the opposite of what the recipe tells you to do. I don’t know which is correct but the way the recipe is written doesn’t produce a good focaccia. I then tried the Pollo E Peperoni on page 165. I had some good pepperoni and pancetta (from Fortuna’s in New Hampshire) and thought this would be a good recipe to let these products shine. This was not the case. The pepperoni and pancetta are fried until crispy and and you are told to wipe the pan clean before going to the next step so none of the flavor from frying the meat products ends up in the subsequent sauce. I thought the sauce looked a little weak (no onions or herbs) but thought that this might be an example of a minimalist Italian recipe where a few good ingredients give a great flavor. It turns out that roasted red peppers, garlic, canned tomatoes (even used Napoli tomatoes) and white wine has little flavor and I was forced to add some oregano to give it any flavor. The timing for cooking the chicken is way too long (5-8 minutes a side browning the chicken followed by 8-10 minutes of cooking in white wine and then 30-35 minutes with all sauce ingredients. The chicken was way past 165, the given target, long before the 30-35 was up. You get the feeling that nobody really tested the recipes against what is written in the book. The resulting dish is a bland tomato/red pepper sauce sprinkled with some fried pepperoni and pancetta at the time of serving which at that point just seems salty. I also made the tortoni (page 214) which had a good flavor but was so hard after having it in the freezer for several hours that it was hard to eat. I found that microwaving each individual dish for 10 seconds made it much easier to eat. Finally, I thought I would try the Almond Florentine cookies. However as I read through the recipe I realized the critical step of mixing the almond/flour mixture with the liquids to make the dough is not even mentioned in the recipe. Again I think the people who tested the recipes against what is written just missed a number of key steps.