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Product description 2010, Paperback, 232 pages Amazon.com Review Product Description Finally a book that combines the fresh, exuberant flavors of great Italian food with the ease and comfort of a slow cooker. Michele Scicolone, a best-selling author and an authority on Italian cooking, shows how good ingredients and simple techniques can lift the usual "crockpot" fare into the dimension of fine food. Pasta with Meat and Mushroom Ragu, Osso Buco with Red Wine, Chicken with Peppers and Mushrooms: These are dishes that even the most discriminating cook can proudly serve to company, yet all are so carefree that anyone with just five or ten minutes of prep time can make them on a weekday and return to perfection. Simmered in the slow cooker, soups, stews, beans, grains, pasta sauces, and fish are as healthy as they are delicious. Polenta and risotto, "stir-crazy" dishes that ordinarily need careful timing, are effortless. Meat loaves come out perfectly moist, tough cuts of meat turn succulent, and cheesecakes emerge flawless. Recipe Excerpts from The Italian Slow Cooker From Publishers Weekly Scicolone ( The Sopranos Family Cookbook) turns her attention to the slow cooker (or crockpot) for preparing homey Italian dishes. In this accessible cookbook, she presents unintimidating recipes (which often suggest the ingredients simmer around 165 degrees for six to eight hours) that serve up hearty dishes with a minimum of fuss. The wide variety of main dishes—seafood, meats, veggies and legumes—and corresponding soups and sauces, capitalize on the flavor that only slow-cooked food can deliver. The sauces are the book's standouts, with recipes for ragus made with chunky pork shoulder or spicy Tuscan sausage, for example. She also includes recipes for a creamy polenta with gorgonzola and mascarpone; risotto-style farro with parmesan; seafood couscous made with halibut, shrimp and scallops; and braised beef with anchovies and rosemary. While her approach is certainly inventive and appealing, some recipes make one wonder whether a slow cooker is actually necessary (the stuffed peppers might be baked just as easily). That said, this cookbook will certainly relieve the time pressure on busy family cooks. (Dec.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. About the Author Michele Scicolone is the author of The Italian Slow Cooker, Entertaining with the Sopranos, The Sopranos Family Cookbook, a New York Times bestseller, and Bistro Laurent Tourondel. Her 1000 Italian Recipes and A Fresh Taste of Italy were nominated for James Beard and International Association of Culinary Professionals Awards. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. IntroductionNear the neighborhood where I often stay in Rome is a Tuscan restaurant with a small window in its façade. A large, round, greenish glass bottle sits in a small brick alcove perched above a wood-fired stove. Every morning, a cook fills the fiasco, as the bottle is called, with dried beans, water, and seasonings. All day long, the beans simmer slowly, absorbing the flavors of the garlic and herbs as they swell, becoming tender and creamy. Passing by one day, I salivated at the sight, and I thought, “This is the original slow cooker!” Until that moment, it had never occurred to me to use an electric slow cooker for Italian cooking, but suddenly, there it was. Not only is a slow cooker perfect for cooking beans, but it's ideal for simmering a Bolognese-style meat ragu, a thick, hearty vegetable soup, or a rich beef stew of the kind I enjoyed in Tuscany. Soups, stews, and pasta sauces, as I had expected, are naturals-no worries about scorching or planning for hours in the kitchen. Just walk away! With dishes that need lots of babying, the slow cooker really comes into its own, offering advantages the stovetop can't match. Prepared conventionally, polenta is tedious, demanding vigilant stirr