Ciao Italia Pronto: 30-Minute Recipes from an Italian Kitchen Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)"Ciao Italia Pronto!" is a better cookbook in theory than in practice.
Italian food? Check! Thirty minute meals? Check! Sounds like just the thing to make a nice meal and still have some time between getting home from work and bedtime. That would be a false assumption.
American kitchens are certainly more sophisticated since the days when Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee owned the Italian cooking franchise. However, many of the ingredients called for in these recipes are still on the exotic side in my corner grocery. Sure, we have farmers markets, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, even an Italian specialty market or two but, if I have to fight traffic gridlock after work to go destination shopping for ingredients, it defeats the purpose of the Thirty Minute meal. The author recognizes this problem and provides a four page directory of mail order houses to obtain some of the required ingredients. This immediately makes about 40 percent of these recipes more trouble than they're worth.
If you do manage to find the ingredients, know that these recipes are neither simple, nor fast.
The recipe for "Lazy Lasagne" requires eight ingredients, and bakes for 30-35 minutes. That's cooking time only, and does NOT include prep time. Oh, and the tomato sauce for the lasagne is a recipe on a separate page. The sauce requires an additional eight ingredients and 20 minutes of cooking time.
Another main dish, "Fresh Tuna with Artichoke, Capers and Chickpeas," requires 12 ingredient and we're advised to make it early in the day, or a day ahead.
Some of the dishes are unfamiliar and pictures of the prepared food would have been a big help. There are only eight full page color pictures located in the center of the book, one appetizer, one soup, two main dishes, two salads, and two desserts.
If you're interested in this book for quick, convenient recipes, look elsewhere. This is far more complicated and time consuming than the advertised "....30 Minute Recipes from an Italian Kitchen." Not recommended.

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