Weeknights with Giada
Quick and Simple Recipes to Revamp Dinner: A Cookbook
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
Giada De Laurentiis is one of America’s most-loved culinary stars, adored for her Food Network hit shows and her New York Times bestselling cookbooks alike, both of which feature her fresh, flavorful Italian recipes. For the first time, Giada tackles weeknight cooking, sharing her favorite tips and go-to dishes—all in her vibrant signature style—to get a delicious meal on the table in a flash.
After a full day, Giada, like most parents, wants nothing more than to sit down for a home-cooked dinner with her husband, Todd, and their daughter, Jade. Weeknights with Giada rises to the challenge, delivering soups, sandwiches, pizzas, pastas, and meat and fish dishes that come together quickly as stand-alone main courses—most in half an hour or less: Rustic Vegetable and Polenta Soup, a hearty soul-warming one-pot dish, cooks in under twenty minutes; Lemony White Bean, Tuna, and Arugula Salad is a great meal that’s quickly assembled from pantry and fridge essentials; Spicy Linguini with Clams and Mussels is a fifteen-minute-or-less spectacular pasta; and you can’t beat Grilled Sirloin Steaks with Pepper and Caper Salsa, which are also ready in just fifteen minutes. From inventive breakfast-for-dinner dishes and meatless Monday vegetarian recipes—both weekly traditions in Giada’s house—to picnic sandwiches and hearty salad recipes for reinventing leftovers, Weeknights with Giada reveals every secret in her repertoire. Even the desserts are quick to mix and bake, should a craving—or a last-minute school bake sale—strike.
Here is Giada at her most inventive—and at her most laid-back. Flavor, freshness, and fun take center stage while cooking times, pots dirtied, and stress are kept to a minimum. With gorgeous color photographs and intimate home snapshots of Giada and her family, Weeknights with Giada is a welcome handbook of fantastic recipes and surefire Monday-to-Friday strategies for every home cook.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her sixth cookbook, De Laurentiis explains to her readers, "This is what weeknights look like in my house." Motivated by her desire to sit down to dinner with her husband and four-year-old daughter despite her busy schedule, De Laurentiis has "shaken up her weeknight repertoire to include only dishes that can be pulled together after a full day... and be accomplished in under an hour." De Laurentiis delivers on her promise the book is full of quick, easy dishes that follow her formula simple and pleasing. A chapter on soups and salads includes jalape o and cherry tomato gazpacho that requires no cooking at all, and caramelized onion, chicken, and grapefruit salad that calls for shredded rotisserie chicken breasts to save time. Pizza with onion, sausage, and basil and calzone recipes use store-bought pizza dough, and turkey and pancetta pot pies are made with unroll-and-bake pie crust. Though not terribly original or innovative, De Laurentiis's recipes in this book are effective. The dishes are predictable but pleasant. Also included, "Change of Pace," a chapter of internationally inspired dishes like vegetables in red curry and Asian quinoa with salmon, and "Breakfast for Dinner," which includes a tasty spin on eggs Florentine and a peach and cherry frittata made with frozen fruit. Visually appealing, the book is full of photos of both De Laurentiis's food and family.
Customer Reviews
Very Pleased
I have purchased every single cookbook Giada has written, and was very excited to see her cookbooks available on iBook. Down loaded her latest one, Weeknights with Giada and have tried a couple recipes and they are wonderful as always. One thing I would like to see is a feature for writing notes to add to the recipes. One of the recipes I tried, it took longer to reduce the glaze than what was written in the recipe. So for the future use of this recipe, it would be nice to have written in the notes that it took longer to reduce the liquid for the glaze.
Not formatted for iBooks
It's a shame, when the author spent so much time developing her recipes, that the publisher would charge $19 for a book they didn't bother taking time to format to iBooks. At least many other publishers discount their books when they don't want to bother with it.
So readers beware . . .this book isn't iBooks formatted. I'd strongly urge anyone considering this book, to first download the sample and make sure it's something you're willing to live with.
Disappointed
I was very excited find this book available on the iPad. My thought was that it would be easy to read and take with me on both my iPhone and iPad. The book itself is wonderful, content wise, but the format is disappointing. The book displays two pages on the screen each way that you hold the iPad, thus making the print very small. Yes, you can tap the page to enlarge it, but it distorts the format and is just not what it should be. In short I recommend you buy the actual book for this content. I'm sad I wasted my birthday gift card on this.