Minestrone Books

Reading this book just makes my mouth water and it has some history of Italy, with references to just about every spice and tasty combinations. Wow, I ran out and bought a soup pot! One downside, making broth, Uh! Although I will say the book offers substituted canned broth I just don't want to throw these wonderful ingredients into anything less! This is a great book for readers too, I loved hearing about the Famularo family!

I was so pleased with book and the recipes, I bought two more for my daughter and daughter-in-law. The recipes are simple, complete and made with products available in a Mid-Western town.

What an amazing collection of italian soup recipes! If you want to fill the house with great aromas and please your guests, this book will get you there. The collection is divided by types of soup, i.e. pasta e fagioli, vegetable soups, bean soups, rice and pasta soups, etc. Pappa e pomodoro, broccoli rabe and white bean soup, and escarole soup with tiny meatballs are our three favorites, and all three are so good that we serve them for guests at holiday dinners. By the way, soups are a great place for a fledgling cook to start making real food, and this book will give you lots of very accessible ideas of just where to begin.

This cookbook has the most wonderful soup recipes in it - thick and hearty with deep, rich flavor - I learned so many new tricks for making a good soup taste GREAT! And even better, the soups freeze well so you can make a different recipe each night and freeze the leftovers for another time.

The recipes are easy to read and not too time consuming. While you can always substitute for some of the ingredients listed, splurge and get the items mentioned at least once - I guarantee you will not regret it!

These recipes are not for carb haters or low fat fans. The liberal use of cheese, butter and full bodied broths precludes that. But the recipes are still healthy - They involve lots of veggies, olive oil, herbs and are chock full of good stuff!

Even the most finicky soup eaters will find a favorite recipe in this book. A good bread, salad, a nice wine and one of the soups from this book and you have the perfect meal!

Not only are the soups tasty and inventive; but they are sensible and nutritious. They require little time and ingredients that are neither exotic, nor hard to find. Most recipe books are loaded with expensive ingredients that necessitate driving 20 miles from your home, and that you use only for one particular recipe. I want recipes that use inexpensive stuff I have on hand, or will have no trouble finding. This book meets those requirements. I read cookbooks like other people read novels, and this is the best cookbook I've ever had. Now that he's conquered the soup pot, Joe needs to move on to pastas and more.

Making Minestrone is a fun book for children which features a rhyming text about making minestrone soup. Not only will kids enjoy reading the simple text and looking at the colorful illustrations, but they will also look forward to making this vegan soup. The beginning of the story lets the reader know what ingredients are required - green beans, carrots, onions, peas, potatoes, zucchini, pasta, cooking oil, salt and pepper, and water. The story features several children gathering vegetables they need for their soup from a vegetable garden. The end of the book contains the actual recipe for the soup. Making Minestrone is an entertaining book for young children, but it will be appreciated by anyone who enjoys a tasty, ethical meal. --Reviewed by N. Glenn Perrett

A jaunty rhyme runs through a garden and kitchen with a group of multi-ethnic children who collect the ingredients to make a soup and encountering a range of animals along the way. delightful!

Our library has a "new books" section, and we walked in on a cold day when this book was in front. The cover picture looked just perfect for the weather, so we took out the book. I think we tried one recipe, then bought it on Amazon.

Since then, we've used it quite a bit. The shortribs in Merlot is easy and it's one of my son's favorites. There are certainly some complicated ingredient lists (and we don't make those recipes), but there are lots of simple ones. Sometimes we just look at our current leftovers and can find something to make. Everything has been good, a few are exceptional.

We're pretty basic cooks, and this is one of our better purchases.

I generally do not review cookbooks, but I felt obliged to review Real Stew after seeing so many questions raised about its practicality.

I have owned this book for several years, and both my partner and I cook from it regularly. We give it as a gift to our friends and recommend it often and wholeheartedly. A number of the recipes are on very high rotation with us (the Austrian beer stew comes to mind) and it is never put away for very long in the colder months.

Wright is clearly interested in the history of these recipes as much as he is in the practical side of cooking. That is one of the things that I enjoy so much about it as a cook book. The historical side bars are fascinating and fun, and I really liked the chance to try out some of the ancestors of family favorites. Readers should use their common sense about how far they want to follow him down the road of some of the more historical recipes-- some of them are clearly included for the fun of it. I found that even the less practical entries added texture and humor to the work.

It is true that this isn't the book if you are looking for quick one-pot recipes which you can make in a half an hour and toss into the oven. This is more the kind of book for a Saturday or Sunday afternoon cooking together as a family.

As to the ingredients, it is also true that while some of them may be hard to pick up in the local supermarket, most of them should be able to be found with no real difficulty. You will need access to a good butcher and to a market or organic store which has some of the more out-of-the way vegetables. I live in Amsterdam, very far from the source and target market of most of these recipes, and I have still been able to locate most of the ingredients. (I almost expect to need to substitute with US cookbooks.)

In short, if you are someone who likes to cook and enjoys taking your time and making a bit of a ritual out of it, then this is a book that I would highly recommend.

This book reveals just how precious and convoluted the process of cooking has become for the self-consciously culinarily sophisticated. As a previous reviewer has mentioned, many of its recipes require obscure ingredients or time consuming procedures which when closely examined would appear to have been included for the sake of sheer novelty. Case in point: the author asks the cook in several of the recipes to braid a "rope" from flour and water which is then placed inside the lid of the cooking pot, ostensibly as a seal. After cooking, this "rope" is discarded. Since most well-made casserole dishes or large stewpots include tight-sealing lids, this extra maneuver can only be viewed as the sort of one-upsmanship beloved by upscale cooks with too much time on their hands. Likewise, complex steps such as rendering one's own lard (which the author requires the cook to do in more than one recipe) or tracking down expensive, obscure spices which will in all likelihood be used only once, and then in minute quantity, simply do not justify the time or effort involved. The basic idea of a stew is to create a tasty, satisfying one-pot meal from available ingredients. When it takes weeks to assemble the ingredients and more than a day to prepare the dish, somebody is definitely missing the point.

Another problem with "Real Stews" is its seeming obsession with the exotic over the familiar. All cultures have delicious culinary traditions -- well, at least most of them do -- but to insist that American cooks precisely duplicate the ingredients and cooking conditions necessary for ethnic verisimilitude smacks of snobbery at best and condescension at worst. A little more emphasis on user-friendly and, dare it be said, familiar recipes would have made this book considerably more useful. As it is, for most home cooks, it's likely to gather considerable dust.

This book, like all of Clifford Wright's books, is a pleasure and a treasure. The man is a genius. Most of the recipes are extremely easy and extremely delicious, like the Hungarian Smoked Sausage and Prune Stew, which has a total of 4 ingredients, including water (a garnish/enrichment adds 2 more). Wright makes the recipes easy by giving authentic ingredients but including substitutes that you can find in any market. For example, he says to use a prosciutto bone or a ham bone; goat milk or cow milk plus cream, etc. Many of the stews have only 3 or 4 ingredients after water and salt and pepper; many include ingredients that are just throw-ins that require no preparation, like olives, capers, tomato paste, nuts, or raisins. The more adventurous cook can try recipes that include things like preserved lemons--Wright tells you how to make them. He also makes the book idiot-proof with the organization: "Stews With Beef," "Stews With Pork," "Stews With Vegetables"--you get the idea. If you don't like some of the ingredients, you can substitute what you do like. You can't go wrong with Wright.

I have owned this book for about a year now, and it's fantastic. The recipes are not instant, but if you have the time and inclination to make wonderful, authentic tasting (vegetarian and non-vegetarian) food, buy this book. My particular favorites are the chicken and sweet potato curry, spinach bouillibaise, and the full-length traditional bouillabaise. However, I have never made a recipe from this book that I didn't like. After buying loads of seasonal vegetables at the farmer's market - this book is one of my first stops in finding ways to use the vegetables. I'm buying a copy today for my brother; I'm sure he'll love it. I'm also looking forward to using Mr. Wright's Meditaranean cookbook which I'm buying.

Garbage, on attack to the true Italian Culture just to make a dollar
Shame on you
Osvaldo

I enjoyed reading Carusone's perspective of his stay in Italy through USAC. Although I didn't always agree with his view of how things work in Italy, he presented it in a humorous and entertaining way. It would definitely be useful and fun for anyone going to Italy or who has been.

This is a well-written, humorous, first-person account of returning to the native land of the author's ancestors as a "visiting professor" (el Professore Visitando) - - - a delightful travel saga, mingled capably with history, culture, and a lot of Carusone family background. A great read for: persons who plan to travel to Italy (or who would like to make such a trek) since it is filled with great hints and advice for spending any time in Italy; for persons who have ALREADY traveled to Italy who will enjoy chuckling at the many unique stories; or for those with Italian heritage.