Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Let me start off by saying I love Giada De Laurentiis's Food Network TV show. She's pretty, is a wonderful cook, conveys her love and enthusiasm for Italian food and clearly enjoys sharing her knowledge. I think her success is well-deserved. Having said all this, I find her first cookbook a whopping disappointment for a number of reasons. The world hardly needed a selection of some of the most hackneyed, if well-loved recipes of Italian recipes served up yet one more time. The best recipes for many of these dishes can be found in the works of Lydia Bastianich, Marcella Hazan--even Sophia Loren's two cookbooks. I suppose if you are new to cooking Italian food, De Laurentiis' unpretentious style and easy instructions will appeal. But even minimally seasoned Italian cooks will have most of the recipes on hand in many other collections. The show offers much more variety than she has chosen to include here. The art direction on this book is sophomoric in the extreme. We are treated to endless black and white photos of the comely Ms. De Laurentiis. So what? It starts to look like a vanity production. Lots of chefs appear in their photos, but juicing a lemon, chopping parsley, smiling as she stirs a pot? Comeon! Then my favorite bugaboo in contemporary cookbooks. We are treated to all these artsy-fartsy photos with very clear images of dishes in front with fadeout in the back of the photos. Worse, accompanying a recipe for Spinach and Pine Nut Pesto is a pristine color photo of a wooden spoon filled with pine nuts on top of a kitchen towel, or a recipe for Fried Calamari and on the facing page, a basket of artfully arranged lemons. Pizza Di Spaghetti is an interesting recipe. So is Torta Di Pasta and as long as you are spending a fortune for needless photographs, how about a shot of one of these dishes instead of Giada stirrinng? But the dumbest photo here is the one for Chicken Cacciatore. Served in a beige plate-bowl, the skin looks sallow and undercooked, the tomatoes washed out. Where is the vibrant color of this most colorful of chicken stews? As a former food stylist, De Laurentiis should never have approved that photo for inclusion in the book. Am I being too literal? YES absolutely! I think cookbook photos should not only be beautiful (if you need them at all), they should be instructive or edifying. If I want an artbook, I'll buy one. Clearly the world doesn't need another Italian cookbook. And Food Network Stars are churning out too many mediocre cookbooks (Barefoot Contessa, Paula Deen). I understand that these stars have to take advantage of their short shelf life on TV. But when Bastianich, Hazan, Bugliali, Michelle Sciccolone, Carol Field, Mario Batali, Biba Caggiata, Lynne Rosetto-Kaspar, and scores of others have covered this terrain in such splendid detail, adding a superficial and trendy newcomer to this group ought to mean something. Rachel Ray, (a TV chef who has really won me over once I got past her cutesy TV persona) who offers fast meals in minutes, provides more interesting Italian fare than can be found here. I think De Laurentiis is an enormously appealing TV chef but does she have the chops to deliver something fresh to the this well-trod category? I'm sorry, but this new entry will not do.